The Vienna Circle, led by Carnap and Schlick, took over the conception of philosophy as reductive logical analysis and the doctrine of the analytic purely formal, factually empty charact
Trang 1distinguished adherents in the United States (to which
many of the European positivists fled from Hitler), such as
Nagel and Quine The very different ideas of the later
Wittgenstein, who came back to Cambridge in 1929,
closer to those of Russell’s original ally G E Moore,
became increasingly influential and, under the label
*‘linguistic philosophy’, prevailed in most of the
English-speaking world from 1945 until about 1960 In the
post-positivist era from then until the present English-speaking
philosophy has been mainly analytic in the older,
pre-lin-guistic sense, but with large variations of method and
doc-trine
There had been some anticipations of analytic
philoso-phy before Russell achieved philosophical maturity The
first is possibly Bernard Bolzano, a brilliant, isolated, and
largely neglected Czech Gottlob Frege, W K Clifford,
Karl Pearson, Ernst Mach, and Henri Poincaré were all
serious mathematicians, several of them highly creative
and original, and they wrote philosophy, as did their more
self-consciously analytic successors, in something of the
style of a mathematical treatise: impersonal and objective,
with terms explicitly defined and arguments formally and
rigorously set out That distinguishes them from the
great fellow-travellers of analytic philosophy, Hume and
J S Mill
Russell and Moore emerged as original thinkers in the
first decade of the century when they broke
demonstra-tively away from the kind of Bradleian idealism which
they had been taught They argued against the view that
reality is both an undissectable unity and spiritual in
nature, that it is a plurality made up of an indefinite
multi-plicity of things, and that these things are of
fundamen-tally different kinds—material and abstract as well as
mental They fatally undermined the idealist theory that
all relations are internal or essential to the things they
relate and, less persuasively, that the direct objects of
per-ception are subjective contents of consciousness
In the first decade of the twentieth century Moore was
the leader, Russell being fully engaged in his work in
mathematical logic Moore’s immensely methodical
work had a quasi-mathematical quality, and he was
per-haps the first to describe it as analysis What he meant by
that was the careful elaboration in the most lucid possible
way of the precise meaning of the problematic assertions
he was discussing, to make them available for critical
scrutiny That entangled him in the toils of the so-called
paradox of analysis (if analysis reveals A to be identical to
BC, how can ‘A = BC’ amount to more than the empty
truism ‘A = A’?)
During this decade Russell’s main work was in logic He
defined the basic concepts of mathematics in purely logical
terms and attempted, less successfully as it turned out, to
deduce the fundamental principles of mathematics from
purely logical laws In his theory of descriptions he
pro-vided a new kind of definition, a definition in use or
con-textual definition, which did not equate synonym with
synonym but gave a rule for replacing sentences in which
the word to be defined occurred with sentences in which it
did not This was described by F P Ramsey as the ‘para-digm of philosophy’
Working in conjunction with Wittgenstein between
1912 and 1914 Russell elaborated the *‘logical atomism’
set out rather casually in his Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) and Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918) and
more systematically, but obscurely, in Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus All our significant thought and discourse, they
held, can be analysed into elementary propositions which directly picture states of affairs, the complexes analysed being composed by the relations symbolized by the logical terms ‘not’, ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘if ’, and, perhaps, ‘all’ (Russell thought it irreducible, Wittgenstein did not) The truth, or falsity, of the complex propositions was unequivocally determined by the way in which truth and falsity were dis-tributed among their elementary components Some complexes were true whatever the truth-value of their elementary components These were the truths of logic and mathematics
Both believed that the true logical content of complex propositions is concealed by ordinary language and can be made clear only by their kind of reductive analysis Prop-ositions which cannot be analysed into elementary state-ments of fact are ‘metaphysical’, for example those of morals and religion They also held that elementary propositions represented the world as it really is But the ontological conclusions they drew from this were differ-ent Wittgenstein took it to reveal the general form of the world Russell, giving elementary propositions an empiri-cist interpretation as the immediate deliverances of sense, arrived at the neutral monist conclusion that only ential events really exist; the minds which have the experi-ences and the physical things to which the experiexperi-ences attest are merely constructions out of experience, not independently existent things He drew here on the analy-ses of material particles, points in space, and instants of time, put forward in the early 1920s by A N Whitehead, the collaborator in his early logico-mathematical work The Vienna Circle, led by Carnap and Schlick, took over the conception of philosophy as reductive logical analysis and the doctrine of the analytic (purely formal, factually empty) character of logic and mathematics They followed Russell in taking elementary propositions
to be reports of immediate experience and developed from this the principle that verifiability in experience is the criterion of meaningfulness Deprived of significance by this criterion, judgements of value are imperatives (or expressions of emotion) not statements and the affirma-tions of the metaphysician or theologian are at best a kind
of poetry But they rejected the analytic ontologies of their predecessors Against Wittgenstein they contended that language is conventional, not pictorial Against Russell they maintained that bodies and minds are no less really existent than events, despite being constructions rather than elements
*Logical Positivism was memorably introduced to the
English-speaking world in A J Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936) But as it became the height of philosophical
30 analytic philosophy
Trang 2fashion a new tendency was in the making in
Wittgen-stein’s fairly esoteric circle Language, he came to hold, in
his new philosophical incarnation, is not simply
descrip-tive or fact-stating, it has a multiplicity of uses and its
meaning consists in the way it is used It does not have a
logical essence which it is the business of analysis to reveal;
it has, rather, a natural history which it is the therapeutic,
puzzlement-alleviating task of philosophy to describe
Our beliefs, about the mental states of other people for
example, cannot be analysed into the evidence we have
for them; that evidence is more loosely related to
the beliefs as ‘criteria’ of their truth This mood of
accept-ance, rather than large-scale reconstruction or
reinterpret-ation, of ordinary discourse, has some affinity with the
resolute pedestrianism about common sense and ordinary
language which Moore had been practising for a long time
It took a different form in post-war Oxford: breezily definite
with Ryle, scrupulously lexicographic with J L Austin
This is the linguistic philosophy which, centred at Oxford,
was dominant in the English-speaking world from 1945 to
about 1960, when it disappeared in its original form almost
without trace
Philosophical analysis, in a more or less Russellian
spirit, but in a considerable variety of forms, has continued
from its revival around 1960 to the present day Quine’s
famous essay ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (1951)
seemed to undermine the whole analytic project He
claimed that there was no theoretically adequate way of
distinguishing identity of meaning from identity of
refer-ence, on the ground that there is no scientifically
respect-able ‘criterion of synonymy’ The alleged findings of
philosophical analysis, therefore, are no more than
gen-eral factual beliefs we are specially unwilling to abandon
in the face of apparently contrary evidence Quine’s view
was received with great respect and was very little
criti-cized, but philosophers went on very much as before
Quine’s own philosophy is analytic in tone His argument
is not obviously convincing Is a scientific criterion of
sameness of meaning really needed? The verificationist
theory of meaning was widely criticized, for the most part
as self-refuting, by no one more effectively, perhaps, than
by Popper, who based a new account of the nature of
sci-ence on the thesis that falsifiability is a criterion, not of
meaning, but of scientific status The two most notable
specimens of reductive analysis (the phenomenalist
con-ception of material things as systems of appearances,
actual and possible, and the behaviourist theory of states
of mind as dispositions of human bodies to behave in
cer-tain ways in particular circumstances) were generally
dis-carded, most thoroughly in the work of various Australian
materialists, for instance D M Armstrong and J J C
Smart They held that we have direct, if inherently fallible,
awareness of material things and that the mental states of
which we are aware in self-consciousness are in fact
iden-tical with brain-states which cause behaviour
There is not much literal analysis in the work of
promin-ent late twpromin-entieth-cpromin-entury practitioners of analytic
philo-sophy such as Putnam and Nozick But they think and
write in the analytic spirit, respectful of science, both as a paradigm of reasonable belief and in conformity with its argumentative rigour, its clarity, and its determination to
*analysis; British philosophy today; verification princi-ple; Oxford philosophy; reductionism
Brand Blanshard, Reason and Analysis (London, 1962).
M Dummett, Origins of Analytic Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.,
1994)
John Passmore, Recent Philosophers (London, 1985).
Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (London,
1918)
Anders Wedberg, History of Philosophy, iii (Oxford, 1984).
analytic, transcendental: see transcendental analytic;
Kant
anamnesis.Recollection (Greek) Plato argued that some knowledge could have been acquired only by our immor-tal souls’ acquaintance with the *Forms before our birth and not through sense-experience ‘Learning’ is therefore
anamnesis In Meno, Socrates elicits geometrical know-ledge from a slave-boy, while in Phaedo he argues that
knowledge of concepts like equality, which are always imperfectly instantiated in this world, could come only
*memory
anarchism.In its narrower meaning anarchism is a theory
of society without state rule In its broader meaning it is a theory of society without any coercive authority in any area—government, business, industry, commerce, reli-gion, education, the family Although some of its advo-cates trace its roots back to Greek thinkers—such as the Stoics, especially Zeno (336–264 bc)—or to the Bible, the modern work generally recognized as presenting the first articulation and defence of anarchism is William
God-win’s An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence
on General Virtue and Happiness (1793) Pierre Joseph
Proudhon (1809–65) is credited with being the first person
to call himself an anarchist There is no single defining position that all anarchists hold, and those considered anarchists at best share certain family resemblances Anarchist positions can be total, dealing with society as
a whole and calling for a violent *revolution, or more restrictive in their views, dealing with smaller units or advocating piecemeal change They also vary from the radical individualism of Max Stirner to the anarchist com-munism of Kropotkin, with the positions of Proudhon, Bakunin, and the anarcho-syndicalists falling in between Max Stirner (1806–56) is the most individualistic and
‘egoistic’ of the anarchist thinkers For him the freedom of the individual is absolutely sovereign, and any infringe-ment on that freedom is unjustifiable He attacks not only the *State, government, law, and *private property, but also religion, the family, ethics, and love—all of which impose limits on individual action He does not pre-clude human interaction but all associations are to be
anarchism 31
Trang 3completely free and individuals enter them only for their
own reasons and benefit Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910),
another somewhat atypical anarchist, adopted a type of
religious anarchism, using the Bible to attack the rule of
one person over another and the legitimacy of secular
power He finds in the Gospels a doctrine of peace and love
that is sufficient for the organization of society and that
is violated by governments, laws, police, armies, and
private property Proudhon’s anarchism advocated a
soci-ety based on small enterprises and skilled craftsmen who
organized to form a co-operative community of equals
Michael Bakunin (1814–76), who favoured violent
over-throw of the state, envisaged replacing it with a federation
built from below on the basis of voluntary associations
Anarcho-syndicalism focused on trade unions, or
syndi-cates, as the engine of change in society, for syndicates
championed the interests of the workers and could serve
as the basis for social organization after a successful
revo-lution had overthrown the existing state structures Peter
Kropotkin (1842– 1921), as an anarcho-communist, held
that the individual is essentially a social being who can
fully develop only in a communist-type society, which
precluded authoritarian rule and the special interests of
dominant groups Like other communists he advocated
the abolition of private property and the development of a
society built on common ownership of the means of
pro-duction For him the commune is the basic social unit, and
communal needs are balanced with individual needs
Despite their differences the proponents of anarchism
generally tend to: (1) affirm freedom as a basic value; some
add other values as well, such as justice, equality, or
human well-being; (2) attack the state as inconsistent with
freedom (and/or the other values); and (3) propose a
pro-gramme for building a better society without the state
Most of the literature on anarchism considers the state an
instrument of oppression, typically run by its leaders for
their own benefit Government is often, though not
always, similarly attacked, as are exploitative owners of
the means of production in a capitalistic system, despotic
teachers, and over-dominant parents By extension
anar-chists hold as unjustifiable any form of authoritarianism,
which is the use of one’s position of power for one’s own
benefit rather than for the benefit of those subject to
authority The anarchist emphasis on *freedom, *justice,
and human *well-being springs from a positive view of
human nature Human beings are seen as for the most
part capable of rationally governing themselves in a
peace-ful, co-operative, and productive manner
Whereas the traditional role of the political theorist is
to justify the existing structures of society, the role of the
anarchist is to challenge these structures and to demand
their justification prior to accepting them In accord with
the anarchists’ view of the state as an instrument of
oppression in the hands of a ruling class, they see law as
simply the means by which that class defends its
self-interest, and armies and police as the means the rulers use
to enforce their will The state so conceived has injustice
built into it and hence is in principle unjustifiable
More-over, the state is the major perpetrator of violence, and the cause of much of the oppression, social disorder, and other ills suffered by society The anarchists differ on how to rid society of the state, violent revolution being the most drastic, and piecemeal change from below, often through education, the least radical
The good society which forms part of the positive anarchist project is similarly an issue on which there is considerable disagreement But most advocates of anar-chism envisage a society to which the members voluntar-ily belong, which they are able to leave if they wish, and
in which the members agree to the rules under which they live Size and levels of complexity are not major issues, although the emphasis is usually on beginning with smaller units of self-determination and building
on those
Thus, anarchism does not preclude social organization, social order or rules, the appropriate delegation of author-ity, or even of certain forms of government, as long as this
is distinguished from the state and as long as it is adminis-trative and not oppressive, coercive, or bureaucratic Anarchism maintains that all those who hold authority should exercise it for the benefit of those below them, and
if they hold offices of authority they are accountable to those below them and recallable by them The abolition of the state precludes not the organization of things but the domination of people Most, though not all, anarchists acknowledge the importance of the moral law as the proper guide for social interaction, providing this is envis-aged as compatible with the autonomy of the individual Most anarchists accept a kind of democracy in which people are self-governed at all levels The details of social organization are not to be set out in advance but are in part
to be decided by those who are subject to them
Although anarchists were politically active in Spain, Italy, Belgium, and France especially in the 1870s and in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and although anar-chists formed an anarcho-syndicalist union in the United States in 1905, there have been no significant, successful anarchist communities of any size
Anarchism enjoyed a renaissance for a period in the 1960s and early 1970s in the writings of such proponents as Paul Goodman (1911–72), perhaps best known for his writings on education, and Daniel Guérin (1904–88), who develops a communitarian type of anarchism that builds on but goes beyond nineteenth-century anarcho-syndicalism, which is now out of date
As a political theory anarchism is not at present widely held; but it continues to serve as an important basis for the critique of authoritarianism and as a continuing reminder
of the need to justify existing institutions r.de g
D Guérin, Anarchism, tr Mary Klopper (New York, 1970).
J Joll, The Anarchists, 2nd edn (London, 1979).
G Woodcock, Anarchism (Harmondsworth, 1986).
Anaxagoras(500–428bc) *Pre-Socratic philosopher A native of Clazomenae in Asia Minor, he lived most of his life at Athens, where he was a friend of the democratic
32 anarchism
Trang 4statesman Pericles Rather unreliable sources say that he
was ultimately exiled from Athens after a prosecution for
impiety (his statement that the sun was a large lump of
metal was allegedly the basis of the charge)
Like his contemporaries the early Atomists (Leucippus
and Democritus), Anaxagoras re-thought the Milesian
cosmological enterprise in the light of Eleatic methods
and arguments, but without any wholesale acceptance of
them
On two cardinal points Anaxagoras went the opposite
way to Atomism (1) He postulated a material continuum
(without void) with infinitely complex micro-structure
There were infinitely many fundamental kinds of matter,
not further reducible and not interchangeable All of these
kinds of matter were present in every spatially continuous
portion of matter, however small Hence there were no
places in which any type of matter existed unmixed with
all the others There was ‘a portion of everything in
every-thing’ This was in effect a ‘field theory’ (as opposed to the
Atomists’ ‘particle theory’), exploiting the possibilities of
arbitrarily small scales of size The details are obscure and
controversial (2) His universe was dominated by
tele-ology The ordering of things was planned and initiated by
Mind (Nous), which was conceived of both as a unified
cosmic intelligence and as an explanation of human and
animal intelligence Both Plato and Aristotle praised
Anaxagoras for his explicit assertion of the rule of Mind
(Aristotle said ‘he showed up like a sober man, as
pared with his wild-talking predecessors’), but both
com-plained that he gave only mechanistic explanations of
*atomism, physical; teleological explanation
M Schofield, An Essay on Anaxagoras (Cambridge, 1980).
Anaximander of Miletus( fl c.550bc) Associate of Thales
and one of the three Milesian ‘natural philosophers’
(*Pre-Socratic philosophy.) His monistic cosmology was
based on the self-transformations of ‘the Infinite’, an
infin-itely extended being, living and intelligent In his
explan-ations, biological and legal analogies are used, and there
is a striking appeal to symmetry (the earth stays at rest
because it is symmetrically placed in the cosmos; so there
is no reason why it should move in one direction rather
C H Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology
(New York, 1960)
Anaximenes of Miletus( fl c.550bc) The third of the
troika of Milesian ‘natural philosophers’ (*Pre-Socratic
philosophy) He proposed a cosmological theory in which
the whole of the universe consisted of air in different
degrees of density—the first attested attempt to explain
qualitative differences in terms of quantitative ones, and
one backed up by an appeal to everyday experience (air
breathed from an open mouth feels warm, air breathed
through pursed lips feels cold) e.l.h
J Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, i (London, 1979), 38–47.
ancestral relation.A relation obtained through the fol-lowing logical transformation of a given relation: The
ancestral of a relation R holds between objects x and y if and only if either x bears R to y, or x bears R to some z1that
itself bears R to y, or x bears R to some z2that bears R to a
z1that bears R to y, or Thus, ‘ancestor’ is the ancestral
of ‘parent’, and ‘less than’ (restricted to natural numbers)
is the ancestral of ‘immediate predecessor’ Frege showed that the ancestral of a *relation can be explicitly defined, without ellipsis, within second-order logic a.gup
G Boolos, ‘Reading the Begriffsschrift’, Mind (1985).
ancient philosophy.‘Ancient philosophy’ is the conven-tional title, in Europe and the English-speaking academy, for the philosophical activities of the thinkers of the Graeco-Roman world It includes a succession of philoso-phers who operated over a 1,000-year period from the middle of the first millennium bc to the middle of the first millennium ad—from Thales and the earliest Pre-Socratics to late Neoplatonists and Aristotelian commen-tators, such as Simplicius and Philoponus Later thinkers
in Europe (e.g Scotus Eriugena) are normally assigned to the category *‘medieval’, as are Arabic philosophers such
as Avicenna and Averroës, and also Jewish philosophers such as Gabriol and Maimonides Contemporary philoso-phers from other cultures (e.g Confucius, Buddha) are also not included
Traditionally ancient philosophy is divided into four main periods: the *Pre-Socratic philosophers, Plato, Aris-totle, the post-Aristotelian philosophers Recently there has been a tendency to divide the last by adding a fifth phase of Christian and Neo-platonist philosophers The most important of the ancient philosophers are Plato and Aristotle; and even though there has been a considerable shift of interest in the past thirty years in favour of the post-Aristotelians, it remains the case that the two fourth-centurybc philosophers are the primary focus of interest, both to specialists and to students and the wider philo-sophical community This is partly because their writings survive in extensive and accessible form, so that they can
be studied and assessed for the quality of their argumenta-tion as well as for their conclusions; it is also a recogniargumenta-tion
of the superior nature of their philosophical work
In their different ways Plato and Aristotle look both backwards and forwards in philosophy Each constructs his theorizing so as to encapsulate leading elements in the earlier tradition: Plato does this with impressionistic flair, Aristotle perhaps with more precision and historical accur-acy This retrospective work is intended to supersede the insights of preceding philosophers; and it largely succeeds
in this Thus the available options in ontology are
summar-ized in Plato’s Sophist as monism, dualism, or pluralism,
and a commitment to the primacy either of perceptible body or of intelligible ideas Aristotle discovers in earlier thought confused but recoverable traces of four distinct kinds of explanation, which correspond to his four kinds of cause—material, formal, efficient, and final In these and
ancient philosophy 33
Trang 5many other ways Plato and Aristotle absorb what is
philo-sophically valuable in Pre-Socratic thought, and they
transmute it into something which has endured with
greater vitality in the later philosophical tradition
None the less, there are certain Pre-Socratic themes
which Plato and Aristotle undervalue and which have
been emphasized by contemporary philosophers
Heracli-tus and Parmenides, in particular, were clearly very much
concerned with the relations between language and
thought and the world Philosophers in the contemporary
hermeneutical tradition (but also many others before
them) have been interested in Parmenides’ comments on
the limits of the expressible; and Marxists and
paraconsist-ent logicians have sought to develop Heraclitus’
aph-orisms on the contradictoriness of truth Empedocles and
Anaxagoras are scrutinized to see how they connected
chemical analysis with mental causation
While the concerns of Plato and Aristotle also exert
great influence on the work of post-Aristotelian
philoso-phers, these latter also develop a number of new themes
For example, there were substantial advances in
proposi-tional and modal logic, in speculation about the natural
basis of epistemology, and in the philosophies of physics
and of law They also supplied important clarification of
the philosophical issues involved in the debate over
deter-minism and freedom In ethics they were concerned with
appropriate attitudes to animal suffering and to human
death, in ways which anticipate recent themes in applied
philosophy
What are the main features of ancient philosophy? This
1,000-year period of Graeco-Roman philosophy has
bequeathed certain central themes for later thinkers It is
incumbent on all philosophers to be aware of the precise
way in which these problems were introduced into the
subject, even though the later course of debate may have
injected new directions or emphases The key themes are
these: the ontological specification of non-perceptible
items (e.g numbers, gods, universal kinds); the isolation
of objective causes in the non-animate sphere of nature;
the analysis and evaluation of patterns of reasoning and
argument; the importance of understanding in the pursuit
of the good life; the need to analyse the nature of the
human person; the importance of the concept of justice in
defining the nature of a political system; critical
self-awareness regarding the content and manner of
philo-sophical utterance; and many more
The ancient philosophers created and laid much of the
groundwork for later philosophical debate in the fields of
ontology, epistemology, logic, hermeneutics, ethics, and
political philosophy They also established the crucial
fea-tures of philosophical method—open-mindedness as to
the agenda of problems, and rational progress through
argument and debate
While much of ancient philosophy runs with common
sense, it also contains paradoxes and eccentricities
Among these are to be counted Plato’s theory of Forms,
according to which universal kinds or properties are
actu-ally separate from their instances, Aristotle’s conception
of God as concerned only with his own essence, and the Stoics’ absolutist distinctions between good and bad Some themes are prominent in ancient philosophy which have become less so in the more recent history of the subject, while in the case of others it has been claimed that they were unknown or ignored by the ancient thinkers and only came to the fore in philosophy in the period since Descartes Examples of the former are the sig-nificance of form in relation to the stuff of which a thing is made, and the idea that the most effective strategy for explaining natural change is through end-results (tele-ology) On the other hand, the modern philosophical themes of personal identity, the distinction between mind and body, and the contrast between first and second-order questions—in ethics and elsewhere—seem to be missing from the agenda of ancient philosophy But these idiosyn-crasies can be exaggerated It would be prudent to assume that on these, as on other, topics there will be further research which reopens debate between ancient philoso-phers and their successors
One of the most fertile fields of ancient philosophy was ethics Here a central figure is Socrates, whose intellectu-ally profound and persistent interest in the nature of the good life led him to penetrating comment on human knowledge and rationality The constructive scepticism of Socrates has been a major determinant of subsequent philosophical method Socrates has always been an emblem of the true philosopher; and this iconic tendency has become more pronounced in recent years (It is some-times reinforced by the fact that Socrates, who published nothing, could not have been ‘assessed’ by current league table methods) Aristotle’s ethical work was strongly influenced by Socrates He reacted against Socrates by emphasizing the importance of character and, as such, has inspired a recent revival of what is now called ‘virtue ethics’ His theory of the ethical mean is particularly inter-esting to value-pluralists, who strive to avoid oversimplifi-cation in moral theory Ancient moral philosophy reinforces the contemporary philosophical interest in applying ethical analysis to real life problems The ancient philosophers always saw their theoretical interest as directed on practical matters Their ethics is, therefore, applied as well as being theoretical
A further way in which the habits of ancient philosoph-ical thought connect with modern interests comes from the concept of dialectic Contemporary philosophers are rediscovering the connection between analytical and dialectical philosophical styles The roots of both lie in ancient philosophy, whose leading thinkers placed high value both on the pursuit of philosophical dialogue and on the analysis of complex and potentially ambiguous con-cepts Philosophers who are concerned with hermen-eutics have recently rediscovered the literary complexity
of Plato’s compositions; they have found philosophical significance in the ways in which different characters are portrayed as presenting the truth This method has been applied to some of the most ‘analytical’ of his works, such
as Sophist Attention to the works of the major ancient
34 ancient philosophy
Trang 6plato’s status as the father of Western philosophy is owed
not just to the fortunate preservation of his entire œuvre
(unusual for an ancient philosopher) but to the exceptional
richness, subtlety, breadth, and beauty of his writings
aristotle first came to Plato’s Academy as a teenager, and thirty years later founded a new school in Athens, the Lyceum, where he taught and wrote on all subjects: philo-sophy, logic, politics, rhetoric, literature, and the sciences
He was still regarded as the authority on these subjects 1,500 years later
epicurus taught that pleasure is the only good, but the life
of pleasure that he advocated was a sober one, guided by
wisdom
plotinus, probably a Hellenic Egyptian by birth, settled in Rome in middle age, and spent the rest of his life teaching philosophy through informal discussion groups
ancient philosophy
Trang 7thinkers is an excellent antidote to the division of
philoso-phy into sectarian factions which is still urged in some
quarters
The study of ancient philosophy is an important
elem-ent in philosophy, which needs to be sustained at a level
of suitable scholarly rigour But there is a declining
com-plement of qualified specialist academic staff, and a
*Aristotelianism; Neoplatonism; Platonism; Roman
philosophy; Stoicism; Sceptics, ancient; Epicureanism;
footnotes to Plato
The nature of current work in ancient philosophy can be assessed
from the following rather different kinds of material:
J Barnes, The Toils of Scepticism (Cambridge, 1990).
W K C Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, 6 vols
(Cam-bridge, 1962–81)
T H Irwin, Aristotle’s First Principles (Oxford, 1988).
M M McCabe, Plato and his Predecessors (Cambridge, 2000).
M Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge, 1986).
R Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals (London, 1993).
ancient philosophy, relevance to contemporary
philosophy:see footnotes to Plato.
and:see conjunction and disjunction.
Anderson, John(1893–1962) Anderson had more
influ-ence than anyone else on Australian philosophy, and the
philosophy he taught was unlike anyone else’s (Heraclitus
and Alexander were influences.) It put everything on one
level: no God, no atomic ultimates, no substantival selves;
everything just ‘a set of interacting situations’ occupying a
region of space and time Correspondingly, all truth is of
one kind: there is no necessary truth; there is just being so
Andersonian realism asserts the independence of
knower and known, whatever the known To regard a
relation as at all constitutive of anything is a form of
‘relativistic’ confusion Anderson is always hunting down
relativistic confusion He finds it, for example, in the
obligatory This is generated when a relation with one
term suppressed—a requirer—is seen as a
quality—require-ment—of an action The demolishing questions are: Who
does the requiring? and What is his policy? s.a.g
John Anderson, Studies in Empirical Philosophy (Sydney, 1962)
includes most of Anderson’s writing
J L Mackie, ‘The Philosophy of John Anderson’, Australasian
Journal of Philosophy (1962).
Anderson and Belnap.Alan Ross Anderson (1925–73) and
Nuel D Belnap, Jr (b 1930) came together at Yale
Uni-versity in the late 1950s, the former as teacher, the latter as
student Belnap had returned from study in Europe with
Robert Feys, who had interested him in Wilhelm
Acker-mann’s seminal paper on ‘strenge Implikation’ in the Journal
of Symbolic Logic for 1956; Anderson was delighted to find a
fellow enthusiast, and between them they began (little
knowing what it would become) a programme of research
into *‘relevance logic’
Anderson’s other work in modal logic, deontic logic, and philosophy of mind should not be forgotten; nor his dry wit and felicitous style Equally, remember Belnap’s
short but seminal paper on ‘Tonk, Plonk and Plink’ (Analy-sis (1962) ) giving the beginnings of an answer to Prior on
whether logical connectives can be defined by the infer-ences they make valid; and his work on the logic of ques-tions Both men have worked effectively in joint research with a range of colleagues Last but not least, we should not overlook the effect of both men as inspiring teachers, grandfathers of late twentieth-century philosophical logic through the influence of their pupils s.l.r
A R Anderson, N D Belnap et al., Entailment: The Logic of Rele-vance and Necessity, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1975, 1992).
Angst.A recurrent state of disquiet concerning one’s life which Existentialists interpret as evidence that human life has a dimension which a purely naturalistic psychology cannot comprehend The term was introduced by
Kierkegaard, who held that Angst (usually translated here
as ‘dread’) concerning the contingencies of fortune should show us that we can only gain a secure sense of our iden-tity by taking the leap of faith and entering into a relation-ship with God Heidegger uses the same term (here usually translated as ‘anxiety’) to describe a sense of unease concerning the structure of one’s life which, because it does not arise from any specific threat, is to be diagnosed as a manifestation of our own responsibility for
this structure Sartre uses the term angoisse (usually
trans-lated as ‘anguish’) for much the same phenomenon as
*existentialism; despair
M Heidegger, Being and Time, tr J MacQuarrie and
E Robinson (Oxford, 1962), sects 40, 53
animal consciousness.Whether animals have conscious-ness is a question that naturally arises in modern philoso-phy, which has been dominated in one way or another by Cartesian dualism In my own case, it is suggested, I know that the bodily movements observed by others are accom-panied by a mental life, that is hidden from them; but when I observe their ‘behaviour’, I can’t be certain that they’ve got minds Animals (and nowadays computers) appear to generate the same problem, except that denying them consciousness is felt to be less of an outrage to com-mon sense
Animals are of very different kinds, their behaviour varies, and some have lives closely interwoven with ours Philosophers who treat animal consciousness as problem-atic are happy to say that their own dogs want taking for walks, or look guilty because they’ve been on the furniture Descartes himself, however, steadfastly maintained that his dog was merely an elaborate clock-like mechanism But
he didn’t actually take the dog apart to prove this c.w
M Bekoff and D Jamieson (eds.), Readings in Animal Cognition
(Cambridge, Mass., 1996)
Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part V.
36 ancient philosophy
Trang 8animalism in personal identity.Animalists maintain that
a human *person just is (identical with) a living human
organism or human animal, in opposition to those
philosophers who, because they believe that the
persist-ence conditions of persons are psychological rather than
biological in character, hold that a person is distinct from
his or her living body In defence of their position,
animal-ists urge the plausibility of the view that I existed, as a
human embryo, some weeks before I was the subject of
any conscious mental states, and may well go on existing
for a time after I cease to be such a subject Against the
ani-malist, it may be urged that if my intact and functioning
brain were to be transplanted into the evacuated cranium
of another human animal, I would acquire a new body
rather than someone else acquiring a new brain
How-ever, the animalist may perhaps agree, saying that in
this case the animal that I am is first reduced to the size
of its brain and is then supplied with a new set of body
*personal identity
E Olson, The Human Animal (Cambridge, 1997).
animals. In Western ethics, non-human animals were
until quite recent times accorded a very low moral status
In the first chapter of Genesis, God gives human beings
dominion over the animals In the Hebrew Bible, this
dominion was moderated by some injunctions towards
kindness—for example, to rest one’s oxen on the sabbath
The Christian scriptures, however, are devoid of such
sug-gestions, and Paul even reinterprets the injunction about
resting one’s oxen, insisting that the command is intended
only to benefit humans Augustine followed this
interpret-ation, adding that Jesus caused the Gadarene swine to
drown in order to demonstrate that we have no duties to
animals Aquinas denied that we have any duty of charity
to animals, adding that the only reason for us to avoid
cruelty to them is the risk that cruel habits might carry
over into our treatment of human beings
Descartes’s views were even more hostile to animals
than those of his Christian predecessors He regarded
them as machines like clocks, which move and emit
sounds, but have no feelings This view was rejected by
most philosophers, but Kant went back to a view similar
to that of Aquinas when he held that animals, not being
rational or autonomous, were not ends in themselves, and
so the only reason for being kind to them is to train our
dis-positions for kindness toward humans It was not until
Bentham that a major figure in Western ethics advocated
the direct inclusion of the interests of animals in our
eth-ical thinking
The debate over the moral status of animals remained
peripheral to philosophical thinking until the 1970s, when
a spate of books and articles led to a vigorous and
continu-ing debate Peter Scontinu-inger compared speciesism with racism
and sexism, and urged that there is no good reason
for refusing to extend the basic principle of equality—
the principle of equal consideration of interests—to
non-human animals Singer argued specifically against factory farming and animal experimentation, and urged that, where there are nutritionally adequate alternatives
to eating meat, the pleasures of our palate cannot out-weigh the suffering inflicted on animals by the standard procedures of commercial farming; hence *vegetarianism
is the only ethically acceptable diet On animal experi-mentation, Singer urged that, in considering whether a given experiment is justifiable, we ask ourselves whether
we would be prepared to perform it on an orphaned human being at a mental level similar to that of the pro-posed animal subject Only if the answer was affirmative could we claim that our readiness to use the animal was not based on a speciesist prejudice against giving the ests of non-human animals a similar weight to the inter-ests of members of our own species
Other contemporary philosophers have reached simi-lar, or even more uncompromising, conclusions on a dif-ferent philosophical basis Tom Regan, for example, argued that all animals—or at least mammals above a cer-tain age—are ‘subjects of a life’ and therefore have basic
*rights Eating animals and performing harmful experi-ments on them are, he holds, violations of these rights
In addition to giving rise to a heated philosophical debate, these writings are unique in modern academic philosophy in that they have sparked and continue to influence a popular movement Major animal liberation and animal rights organizations have developed in many countries, taking their inspiration from the writings of aca-demic philosophers like Singer and Regan, and have made many people more aware of the ethical issues involved in
Ted Benton, Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights, and Social Justice (London, 1993).
R G Frey, Interests and Rights: The Case Against Animals (Oxford,
1980)
D Jamieson, Morality’s Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature (Oxford, 2003).
Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley, Calif., 1983).
—— and Peter Singer (eds.), Animal Rights and Human Obligations
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1989)
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York, 1975; 2nd edn
1990)
animal souls.For Aristotle souls are general modes of functioning A plant will have a soul because it feeds and reproduces; the soul of an animal will also cover the cap-acity to move and sense, and that of a person the capcap-acity
to think Descartes substituted the idea of an immaterial
*soul whose essence is abstract thought, excluding non-humans So, he concludes, animals are machines with no feelings (So for humans but not animals there is a chance
of immortality.) But even if there are such souls it does not follow that non-humans do not feel, and thus that they lack souls in Aristotle’s more reasonable sense
a.m
Mary Midgley, Beast and Man (London, 1980).
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 2nd edn (New York, 1990).
animal souls 37
Trang 9animal spirits. There is nothing spiritual about
Descartes’s animal spirits In Cartesian physiology, they
are the purely material medium for the transmission of
nervous impulses in humans and animals ‘All the
move-ments of the muscles and likewise all sensations, depend
on the nerves, which are like little threads or tubes coming
from the brain, and containing, like the brain itself, a
cer-tain very fine air or wind, which is called the “animal spirits”
(les esprits animaux)’ (Passions of the Soul (1649), art 7) For
the relationship between these pneumatic events and
sensory awareness, Descartes had recourse to the pineal
John Cottingham, Descartes (Oxford, 1986), ch 5.
anima mundi.Latin for ‘world-soul’, an idea stemming
from Plato’s Timaeus, where the world is a living
organ-ism, endowed with a soul by the Demiurge It explains the
harmonious celestial motions and is a model for the
restoration of harmony in the human soul The idea was
adopted by Stoicism and Plotinus, and later by Bruno,
Goethe, Herder, and Schelling It is akin to the
‘world-spirit’ (e.g of Hegel), but this is more intellectual and is
not (as the world-soul often is) distinct from, and
F M Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology (London, 1937).
F A Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago,
1964)
anomalous monism.The view that the mental and the
physical are two irreducibly different ways of describing
and explaining the same objects and events The position,
like that of Spinoza, combines ontological *monism with
conceptual *dualism It holds that mental concepts,
though supervenient on physical concepts, cannot be fully
analysed or defined in physical terms, and claims that
there are no strict *psychophysical laws d.d
*supervenience; identity theory of mind
D Davidson, ‘Mental Events’, in Essays on Actions and Events
(Oxford, 1980)
anomie.Breakdown of the conventions of everyday life;
weakening of a society’s collective self-image or social
laws The term derives from the Greek nomos (strictly,
‘anything assigned or apportioned’, ‘that which one has in
use or possession’, but, derivatively, ‘law’, ‘usage’,
‘cus-tom’); so its etymology is suggestive of ‘absence of law’
Anomic terror is the psychological state of individuals
stripped of the mores which socially legitimate their death
to self and other *Durkheim argues that suicide rates
increase during periods of anomie The raising of
philo-sophical questions arguably calls into question established
world-views and partly deconditions the individual If so,
philosophy is partly conducive to anomie s.p
Peter L Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of
Reality (Harmondsworth, 1967).
Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, tr W D Halls,
ed Stephen Lukes (London, 1982)
Anscombe, G E M.(1919–2001) A distinguished pupil of Wittgenstein and one of his literary executors, responsible for editing and translating many of his posthumous
publi-cations Her Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1959)
shed light on his first masterpiece But Elizabeth Anscombe was also, in her own right, one of the most influential philosophers of the late twentieth century Her
1957 book Intention initiated extensive discussion of
inten-tional action and its explanation, and her 1958 essay ‘Mod-ern Moral Philosophy’ reset the agenda for that subject Her ethical writings, critical of contemporary trends, are informed by dogmatic Catholicism Her numerous essays
on metaphysics and philosophy of mind are critical of empiricism, challenging, for example, received views of causality and of the first-person pronoun She was a tutor
at Oxford, and later a professor at Cambridge, and was married to the philosopher Peter Geach p.m.s.h
G E M Anscombe, Collected Philosophical Papers, 3 vols (Oxford,
1981)
Anselm of Canterbury, St (1033–1109) Benedictine monk, second Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, and philosophical theologian dubbed ‘the Father of *Scholasti-cism’ Anselm is justly famous for his distinctive method (‘faith seeking understanding’), his ‘*ontological’ argu-ment(s), and his classic articulation of the satisfaction the-ory of the *atonement Better suited to philosophy and contemplation than to politics, Anselm possessed a subtlety and originality that rank him among the most penetrating medieval thinkers (along with Augustine, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham) and explain the perennial fascination with his ideas
Like Augustine a Christian Platonist in metaphysics, Anselm centres his proofs of God’s existence around the value theory intuition that something is too good not to
be real! In Monologion, he offers *cosmological arguments
that the single source of all goods is Good through Itself
(per se) and hence supremely good It exists through itself
and is the self-sufficient source of everything else In
Proslogion, Anselm reasons that a being greater than which
is inconceivable exists in the intellect because even a fool understands the phrase when he hears it; but if it existed in the intellect alone, a greater could be conceived which existed in reality This supremely valuable object is essen-tially whatever it is better to be—other things being equal—than not to be, and so living, wise, powerful, true, just, blessed, immaterial, immutable, eternal, even the paradigm of sensory goods—beauty, harmony, sweet-ness, and pleasing texture! Yet, *God is not compounded from a plurality of excellences, but supremely simple,
‘wholly and uniquely, entirely and solely good’ (omne et unum, totum et solum bonum), a being more delightful than
which is inconceivable
Not only is God the efficient cause of the being and well-being of everything else, but also the exemplar of all created natures, whose value depends upon their degree
of similarity to the Supreme Good Hence, it is better to be human than horse, to be horse than wood, even though
38 animal spirits
Trang 10every creature is ‘almost nothing’ in comparison with
God As fundamentally ways of striving into God, created
natures have a *teleological structure, a
that-for-which-they-were-made (ad quod factum est) and for which their
powers were given by God Anselm explains in De veritate
how teleology gives rise to *obligation: since creatures
owe their being and well-being to their divine cause, so
they owe it to God to praise him by being the most
excel-lent handiwork (truest instances of their kinds) they can
Obstacles aside, non-rational creatures fulfil this
obliga-tion and ‘act rightly’ by natural necessity; raobliga-tional
crea-tures, freely and spontaneously when they exercise their
powers of reason and will to conform to God’s purpose in
creating them Thus, the goodness of an individual
crea-ture depends upon its natural end (i.e what sort of
imita-tion of divine nature it aims for), and its rightness (in
exercising its natural powers to pursue its end) By
con-trast, God as absolutely independent owes nothing to
any-thing and so has no obligations to creatures
Anselm advertises the optimism of his *ontology in
De casu diaboli by arguing that since the Supreme Good
and Supreme Being are identical, every being is good and
every good a being Corollary to this, because all genuine
(metaphysically basic) powers are given to enable a being
to pursue its natural telos and so to be the best being it can,
all genuine powers are optimific, essentially aim at goods,
while *evils are metaphysically marginalized as merely
incidental side-effects of their operation, involving some
lack of co-ordination among powers or between them and
the surrounding context Accordingly, divine
omnipo-tence properly speaking excludes corruptibility,
passibil-ity, or the ‘ability’ to lie, because the latter involve defects
and/or powers in other things to obstruct the flourishing
of the corruptible, passible, or potential liar Ultimately,
Anselm qualifies the other Augustinian thesis—that evil is
a privation of being, the absence of good in something
that properly ought to have it (e.g blindness in normally
sighted animals, injustice in humans or angels)—by
recog-nizing certain disadvantages (e.g pain and suffering) as
positive beings
Anselm’s innovative *action theory begins
teleologic-ally with the observation that rational creatures were
made for a happy immortality enjoying God and to that
end given the powers of reason to make accurate value
judgements and will to love accordingly While freedom
and imputability of choice are essential and permanent
features of all rational beings, freedom cannot be defined
as the power to sin and the power not to sin because sin is
an evil at which no metaphysically basic power can aim
Rather, for Anselm, freedom is the power to preserve
*just-ice for its own sake Only spontaneous actions that have
their source in the agent itself are imputable Since
crea-tures do not have their nacrea-tures from themselves but from
God, they cannot act spontaneously by the necessity of
their natures To make it possible for them to become just
somehow of themselves, God endows them with two
motiv-ational drives towards goodness—an affection for the
advantageous (affectio commodi) or tendency to will things
for the sake of their benefit to the agent itself; and an
affec-tion for justice (affectio iustitiae) or tendency to will things
because of their own intrinsic value—which they can co-ordinate (by letting the latter temper the former) or not The good angels, who upheld justice by not willing some advantage possible for them but forbidden by God for that time, can no longer sin by willing more advantage than God wills for them, because God wills their maximum as
a reward Moreover, because they now know (what couldn’t have been predicted apart from experience or revelation) that God punishes sin, willing more happiness
than God wills them to will can no longer even appear
advantageous Creatures who sin by willing advantage inordinately lose both uprightness of will and their affec-tion for justice, and hence the ability to temper their pur-suit of advantage or to will the best goods Anselm holds that it would be unjust to restore justice to angels who desert it But animality both makes human nature weaker and opens the possibility of redemption
Anselm’s argument for the necessity of the Incarnation plays out the dialectic of justice and mercy featured in
Proslogion, chs 9–11, and characteristic of his prayers God
is the heavenly patron-king, who awards all creatures the status of clients Justice requires that humans make all of their choices and actions conform to his will Failure to render what is owed insults God’s honour and makes the offender liable to satisfaction Since dishonouring God is worse than destroying countless worlds, the satisfaction due for even the smallest sin is incommensurate with any created good Because it would be maximally indecent for God to overlook such a great offence, and only God can do or be immeasurably deserving, depriving the crea-ture of its honour (through eternal frustration of its end) seems the only way to balance the scales Yet, justice also forbids that God’s purposes be thwarted through created resistance, while divine mercy destined humans for immortal beatific intimacy with God Moreover, bio-logical nature (lacked by angels) makes humans come in families, and justice permits an offence by one family member to be compensated by another Anselm assumes that all actual humans descended from Adam and Eve, and concludes that Adam’s race can make satisfaction for sin, if God becomes a family member and discharges the debt
Anselm’s method reflects his estimate of *human nature and integrates the dynamics of monastic prayer
with anticipations of the scholastic quaestio If human
des-tiny is beatific intimacy with God, ante-mortem human vocation is to strive into God with all of our powers—rea-son as well as emotions and will Because the subject mat-ter—God—is too difficult for us, permanently partially beyond reach, and because human powers have been damaged by sin, our task presupposes considerable educa-tion The holistic discipline of faith tutors us, training our souls away from ‘stupid’, ‘silly’ questions for right-headed fruitful inquiry In the intellectual dimension, human duty
is not the passive appropriation of authority, but faith seeking to understand what it believes through questions,
Anselm of Canterbury, St 39