The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 9 pot

Ideas which have had currency in past theories and which have spread into popular thinking—that art achieves a unique insight into ‘higher’ truths, or provides an elevated form of human

One drawback of an institutional theory is that it cannot

easily be used, as earlier theories were, to persuade us of

what is peculiarly valuable about art Sometimes it is

assumed that art is a good thing to the extent that it has

purely aesthetic value, as distinct from moral or cognitive

or utility value Others think, surely rightly, that art is also

important as a way of gaining understanding of human

behaviour, and that what value art-products have cannot

be divorced from issues of truth and morality Ideas which

have had currency in past theories and which have spread

into popular thinking—that art achieves a unique insight

into ‘higher’ truths, or provides an elevated form of

human self-realization—should not be dismissed, but in

philosophy they require cautious investigation Few

philosophers, one suspects, would be quick to nominate

any one value as that possessed by everything which is

*aesthetics, history of; aesthetics, problems of; emotion

and art

R G Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford, 1938).

G Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic (Ithaca, NY, 1974).

R Wollheim, Art and its Objects, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1980).

art, contemporary.Contemporary art-making practices

from 1945 to the present can be intelligibly viewed as

‘working’ the medium: a sensuous and intellectual

experimentation not just with the physicality of the

con-stituents—the paint, the graphic line, the colour field—

but with that set of conventions specific to the art world at

a particular time—the particular techniques, procedures,

and standards, both articulated and implicit, that

dis-cipline and define an art practice Abstract Expressionists

worked with space and form within a single plane to

estab-lish complex part-by-part relations that collapsed

illusion-istic space while still maintaining ‘the opticality of matter’

(Clement Greenberg) The Minimalists eliminated the

optical focus of spatial art using ‘obdurate masses’

(Don-ald Judd) that were aggressively tactile; they reduced the

bare canvas to a limiting frame, expanding the framing

function of painting by constructing installation works

that brought the spectator literally into the work Using

mixed media, their works borrowed ‘the look of non-art’

(Michael Fried) Together with Pop artists, they extended

the plastic arts into the temporal by working serially In

the period of neo-avant-gardes that included Fluxus,

Con-ceptual, Situationist, Process, and Performance art, a

series of cross-overs took place between sculpture and

architecture, painting and popular culture, and art, music,

film with performance This shift did not lead to another

style, but to a fully transformed conception of art founded

on alternative theoretical premisses Contemporary art is

often characterized by the dematerialization of the art

object into untraditional and often temporary forms,

which include video, performance, installation, and film

art Contemporary artists today, whether

sculpture-based, painting-sculpture-based, installation, or post studio, operate

within ‘a Post Medium Convention’ (Robert Gero) Here

there is no longer a concern with specificity, purity, or the

limits of painting qua painting, but only an artistic concern

with the painterly, the sculptural, the architectural, as well

as the use of artefacts of Pop culture, as a varied means to actualize contents The new canon is Duchampian: any-thing has the potential to be art Today, artworks are often barely recognizable as ‘art’ For example some contempor-ary artists have built houses, cooked dinners, planted gar-dens, or parked cars at the museum as artworks This merging with the world is one way of making artworks critically relevant to a fluid culture that is ahistorically adrift in a virtual space of promiscuous signifiers b.t

Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace

(Cam-bridge, 1983)

C Freeland, Art Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford,

2003)

Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds.), Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford, 1992).

art, philosophy of:see aesthetics.

art, representation in:see representation in art.

art, science, and religion:see science, art, and religion.

art, suspect.There are two important areas in which art comes under suspicion First, a work of art can embody a view that challenges the prevailing beliefs of a society,

such as Manet’s Olympia (which challenged views of

female sexuality) In the Thirties both the Nazis and the Soviet Union made life difficult for any artist not affirming the official line in an academic, classical style In philo-sophical parlance, dominant ideologies will be suspicious

of works of art in which challenges to that dominance are exercised The second area of suspicion concerns the gen-eral public’s suspicion of art (broadly referred to as ‘the avant-garde’) which repudiates sources of value such as beauty, profundity, or technical skill without drawing (in any way that is obvious) on alternative sources of value If one cannot tell by looking whether an object is or is not art (as with much ‘found art’), there will always be the suspi-cion that a fraud is being perpetuated d.m

Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge,

1976)

art and morality.Argument in this area tends to cluster around either of two poles: one seeing the relation between art and morality as close and harmonious, the other more keenly aware of conflicts and tensions between them

1 *Art is taken as vital to moral health It brings into play, expresses, ‘purges’ emotions and energies that, in real-life situations, could be harmful and destructive It allows us, without risk, to explore in depth the essential nature and outworking of endless types of human charac-ter and social incharac-teraction—in plays and novels

60 art

If art appreciation is essentially contemplative,

atten-tive to the individuality of its objects, and respecting and

loving them for what they are in themselves, these

aes-thetic attitudes are close neighbours to the morally

desir-able attitudes of respect for persons and moral

attentiveness to their individual natures and needs

Again, art can enlarge the scope of individual *freedom,

by expanding awareness of our options for action and for

forms of human relationship, beyond those options that

are immediately apparent in everyday society More

broadly, the arts enhance human vitality through teaching

a keener, more vivid perception of the colours, forms,

and sounds of a world of which we are normally only

dimly aware, and a more intense and clarified awareness

of values

2 Nevertheless, art has also been seen as morally

dubi-ous or harmful At the level of theory, the Kantian and

post-Kantian accounts of a disinterested, calmly

contem-plative *aesthetic attitude have recently been facing

crit-ical challenge It is claimed, furthermore, that art

stimulates emotions better not aroused; encourages the

imagination to realize in detail, and to enjoy, morally

deplorable activity, thereby making that more likely to be

acted out in life

If freedom can be enhanced by art, it can also be

dimin-ished—by artworks that present current stereotypes,

fash-ions in attitudes and action, farouche or degraded visfash-ions

of human nature, as if these alone were the ‘available’

models for life-responses There can be little ground for

confidence that the sometimes desperate search for the

innovative and ‘different’ in art (and the role of the

com-plex of interested promoters of particular arts—the

‘art-world’) reliably leads to morally serious and wise

interpretations of human problems r.w.h

*aesthetics, history of; aesthetics, problems of; moral

philosophy, history of; moral philosophy, problems of

J Levinson (ed.), Aesthetics and Ethics (Cambridge, 1998).

Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists

(Oxford, 1977)

J Passmore, Serious Art (London, 1991), ch 8.

art and truth.There are two main philosophical issues

concerning art and truth First, in representational art, is

truthfulness, accuracy, or realism a criterion of value, or at

least relevant to the artistic value an artwork possesses?

Second, is art, representational or not, the source of a sort

of truth other than that which can be attained outside of

art and which can be stated propositionally?

It seems clear that the answer to the first question is that

it depends on the art-form and, even more, on the specific

genre involved With realistic paintings and novels, a high

degree of truth-to-life is generally a virtue, since it is in

tune with the aesthetic aims of such works With

expres-sionist paintings or fantasy novels or avant-garde films, a

high degree of truth-to-life is neither sought nor desirable,

given what such works are about aesthetically It is

some-times held, however, that even in such cases works are

better, the truer they somehow are to the fundamental

facts of human nature, even if taking leave of the outward forms and appearances of human life

Positive answers to the second question have usually looked to what art expresses or exemplifies or illustrates,

as opposed to represents or denotes or describes, as loci of truth of a non-propositional sort, and to forms of intuitive, perceptual, or experiential knowing as modes of access to such truth that the appreciation of art may involve Among the more plausible claims of this stripe are ones concerning insights into the nature of emotional life that engagement with expressive music might afford, and insights into the nature of moral values that engagement with imaginative literature or cinema might afford Many such claims turn on the idea that the experience of art can reveal truths to us that are not manifested in ordinary experience, or that the experience of art can cognitively affect us in certain ways that are unparalleled in

Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criti-cism, 2nd edn (Indianapolis, 1981).

Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, 2nd edn (Indianapolis, 1976) Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Lit-erature (New York, 1990).

art criticism.Critical discourse about the various arts is enormously diverse in nature and intent The versions of criticism which philosophical aesthetics puts forward tend

to be idealized rather than practical accounts Some criti-cism is subsumed under the notion of *aesthetic judge-ment: an evaluation of (say) a novel or musical performance, which professes to state truths about its degree of success, based on the critic’s response, and which may enable other spectators to respond similarly Criticism is also conceived as an interpretative exercise, seeking to construct, by scrutiny of the work, or by using historical evidence, a meaning which the work will bear Whether a literary work or a painting thus interpreted per-mits conflicting readings, and whether there can be any privileged interpretation which approximates to the

‘artist’s meaning’, are matters of great contention c.j

M C Beardsley, The Possibility of Criticism (Detroit, 1970).

arthritis in the thigh was the subject of the following thought experiment Someone who believes that he or she has arthritis in the thigh believes something false But, arguably, a physical duplicate of that individual with the same physical history in a possible world in which the word ‘arthritis’ covers ailments in the thigh as well would,

in comparable circumstances, have a different, true, belief So, it is said, the mental fact of the intentional con-tent of propositional attitudes is partly determined by facts concerning an individual’s socio-linguistic environment

p.j.p.n

*externalism; anti-individualism

T Burge, ‘Individualism and the Mental’, in P French,

T Uehling, and H Wettstein (eds.), Midwest Studies in Philoso-phy, iv (Minneapolis, 1979).

arthritis in the thigh 61

artificial intelligence.A relatively new discipline which

studies the programming and performance of computers

used both for problem-solving across a wide range of

intel-lectual, engineering, and operational tasks, and as a tool in

psychology for modelling mental abilities Originally

inspired by Alan Turing’s 1950 paper ‘Computing

Machin-ery and Intelligence’, in which he replaced the question

whether machines can think by the question whether we

would attribute intelligence to a device that performed (in

written questions and answers) as well as a human (i.e

was indistinguishable) The aim of much work in AI has

been to pass this Turing test by building devices that

perform certain tasks as well as we do, such as playing

chess and constructing proofs Some, however, use AI

techniques to build machines that perform better than we

do, or to perform tasks we cannot perform, whether these

are intellectual tasks such as theorem-proving, the

large-scale storage and use of knowledge about a particular

domain, or physical tasks best performed by robots The

first two kinds of task present problems of representation

for programmers, who must secure access to information

and reliable inferences in a large search space and within a

realistic time-scale The search problem is tackled by using

both *algorithms and *heuristics The former are effective

procedures that produce specified results in a principled

way; the latter are less reliable, but useful, rules of thumb

Although AI research in robotics, theorem-proving, and

the kind of knowledge-based systems used for diagnosing

medical and engineering problems may lack psychological

relevance, the related fields of vision, logic programming,

and knowledge representation are of psychological

rele-vance Typical examples of links with psychology include

work on 3D representation in vision, deductive and

ana-logical reasoning, parsing of natural-language sentences,

conversions between orthographic and phonetic forms,

cognitive maps of the position of objects in a bounded

envi-ronment

Investigations into the nature of computation itself are

part of AI and can be found in Turing’s work According to

the Church–Turing hypothesis, every calculation is

putable and each computation is a procedure which

com-putes an input–output function These can be described

by Turing machines—abstract devices which make

moves according to a table of instructions and a tape

divided into squares on which symbols can be written or

erased Each move consists of reading a symbol on the

tape, deleting or rewriting it, and/or moving to another

part of the tape By repeated applications of these moves

and with an infinitely long tape, it is possible in principle to

create a Turing machine to compute any input–output

function Universal Turing machines are devices that can

mimic the input–output function of any particular Turing

machine To model human intelligence requires a device

with the power of a universal Turing machine, although

the limits of formalization shown by Gödel’s

*incom-pleteness result suggest to many that this may not be

suffi-cient since there are propositions that humans can

understand which cannot be represented formally in a

machine; AI could model only some but not all human intelligence If correct, this result would tell against those who claim that AI not only simulates but replicates think-ing According to this strong AI thesis, a suitably pro-grammed computer would qualify as having mental states Some argue this is because its program would reproduce human psychological processes John Searle has vigorously opposed this thesis, claiming that a human

in a room could carry out programming instructions to convert inputs to outputs written in Chinese characters to the satisfaction of those on the outside without thereby understanding anything about Chinese Since *computers are just formal symbol-manipulators they cannot tell us anything about understanding or thought, and so cannot qualify for mental ascription Many replies have been

offered to Searle’s argument (in M Boden (ed.), The Phil-osophy of Artificial Intelligence).

AI researcher David Marr laid the foundations for psy-chologically realistic computational modelling, in his the-ory of vision, by describing a hierarchy of levels to be found in any theory of computational psychology Level 1 describes what is to be computed and why Level 2 ana-lyses different representations and algorithms for comput-ing that function And Level 3 describes how any given algorithm is to be implemented in the hardware b.c.s

*Chinese room argument; consciousness, its irre-ducibility; mind, syntax, and semantics

M Boden, Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man, 2nd edn

(Cam-bridge, Mass., 1987)

—— (ed.), The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (Oxford, 1990);

includes Alan Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelli-gence’

J Haugeland (ed.), Mind Design (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).

D Marr, Vision (San Francisco, 1982).

A Turing, The Essential Turing, ed B J Copeland (Oxford, 2004).

artificial language.All *language is man-made, but artifi-cial languages are made systematically for some particular purpose They take many forms, from mere adaptations

of an existing writing system (numerals), through com-pletely new notations (sign language), to fully expressive systems of speech devised for fun (Tolkien) or secrecy (Poto and Cabenga) or learnability (Esperanto) Logi-cians’ artificial symbolic languages are none of these, for although they typically contain some new vocabulary (logical *constants) and syntax designed to avoid *ambi-guity and *vagueness, they also largely consist of schemata intended to be open to an inexhaustible range of interpretations, and are therefore not available for

ordin-ary linguistic purposes such as assertion (you can’t use ‘P’

or ‘(P→Q)’, or even ‘(P→P)’, to say anything) Their pur-pose is to present forms into which natural-language

utter-ances may be artificially squeezed; their value is as aids for appraising reasoning, and in the philosophical study of

*Formal language

S Guttenplan, The Languages of Logic (Oxford, 1986).

62 artificial intelligence

artworld:see aesthetics, history of.

asceticism.Principally a doctrine or way of life in which

the enjoyment of bodily *pleasures, comfort, and ease is

forsworn for moral, spiritual, or religious reasons

Enjoy-ment of such pleasures and comforts may be held to tempt

to sin; to prevent contemplation of or dedication to higher

things; to tie one to the illusory world of matter and false

goods; and so on Such doctrines and practices enjoy little

popularity these days, but history records some notable

ascetics such as St Simeon Stylites (c.390–459), who lived

on the top of his pillar and attracted many imitators

n.j.h.d

P Rousseau, Ascetics, Authority and the Church in the Age of Jerome

and Cassian (Oxford, 1978).

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, tr B Ward (London, 1975).

A-series and B-series. These are terms introduced by

J M E McTaggart to describe two different ways in which

events can be thought of as being ordered in *time Events

are ordered in the A-series as being past, present, or future,

whereas in the B-series they are ordered as being earlier or

later than one another Thus the battle of Hastings is past

and the destruction of earth is future, and the former is

earlier than the latter However, events do not change

their B-series relations over time, whereas they do change

in respect of being past, present, or future The battle of

Hastings was once a future event and the destruction of

earth will in time become a past event, but those two

events always have stood and always will stand in the

same earlier–later relation to one another e.j.l

D H Mellor, Real Time (Cambridge, 1981).

as if:see Vaihinger.

aspects. Ways of appearing; what appears in ways of

appearing; in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, what is seen in

*‘seeing as’ *Wittgenstein distinguishes the ‘continuous

seeing’ of an aspect from the ‘dawning’ of an aspect,

suggests that the concept of an aspect is like the concept of

a (re)presentation (Vorstellung), and says that

‘aspect-blindness’ is like the lack of a ‘musical ear’ According to

Wittgenstein, seeing aspects is ‘subject to the will’, but

does not entail the existence of any ‘private object’ In a

change of aspect, paradoxically, there seems to be a new

perception, yet what is presented remains unchanged

In German phenomenology, aspects are the

phenom-enological appearances known as Abschattungen, through

which spatial items such as shapes and colours are given

directly in perception *Husserl thinks physical objects are

presented through Abschattungen, but that non-spatial

items, notably mental processes, are not s.p

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr G E M.

Anscombe (Oxford, 1953), esp 194–6, 206–8, 210, 213–14,

536

Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a

Phenomenological Philosophy, first book, tr F Kersten (The

Hague, 1983), esp §§ 41, 44, 97

ass, Buridan’s.Since the Middle Ages this ass, associated with the name of Buridan though not referred to in his extant writings, has been invoked in discussions concern-ing *free will and *determinism The hungry animal stood between two haystacks which were indistinguishable in respect of their delectability and accessibility Unable to decide from which stack to feed, the ass starved to death

a.bro

assertion.A type of linguistic act (act performed by the utterance of a sentence): in making an assertion, the speaker claims that a *proposition is true (contrast issuing

a command, asking a question) Crucially, the proposition asserted by uttering, for example, ‘He fell’, can also occur unasserted, as part of another assertion, for example ‘If he fell, he died’ Otherwise we could not conclude from these two assertions that he died; and we would have no account of the meaning of complex sentences in terms of their parts Frege held that a perspicuous language would have an ‘assertion sign’ to indicate when a proposition is being asserted In languages like ours, the indicative mood

of the main verb conventionally (though defeasibly) indi-cates that an utterance of the sentence (not as a part of a longer sentence) is an assertion d.e

*statements and sentences

Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language, 2nd edn

(Lon-don, 1981), ch 10

associationism. A theory of the nature and sources of ideas and the relations among sensations and ideas in the mind British associationism is a school of philosophy and psychology which flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries The theory of *ideas was largely derived from John Locke, with contributions to the prin-ciples of association made by David Hartley, David Hume, James Mill and John Stuart Mill, and Alexander Bain, among others These philosophers, and many of their predecessors and contemporaries, British and continental (for instance, Thomas Hobbes, Revd J Gay, Étienne Condillac), were impressed with such facts as that differences in ideas seem tied to differences in sense-experience, so that the theory of innate ideas is implaus-ible; that the presence of something to the mind—the sensible idea of the sun, say—often continues beyond the presence of the object, the sun itself; and that some ideas seem ineluctably tied to others, so that one comes to mind immediately after the other These facts could best be explained by principles relating to how sensations, ideas of sensations, and ideas themselves are associated one with another

David Hartley’s Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations (1749) contains perhaps the first

sys-tematic account of the associationist doctrine; it appears

to have been developed independently of David Hume’s version Hume’s writing and that of other British

contribu-tors to associationism, e.g James Mill’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829) and Alexander Bain’s

associationism 63

The Senses and the Intellect (1855), Emotion and Will (1859),

and Mind and Body (1872) insisted that the primary form of

association is the mere contiguity of ideas of sensation in

experience (Bain was the founder of Mind, in 1876.)

Hart-ley’s earlier version traces the character of types of ideas of

sensations to the physical, ‘vibratory’ motions in the brain

and to the kind, locality, and line of directions of

influ-ences from the brain Later associationists abandon the

physiological account

James Mill described the ‘train of feelings, of which our

lives consist’ as arising by a ‘general law of the Association

of Ideas which is nothing but an order of occurrence, both

successive and synchronous’ Individual sensible ideas do

not arise in the mind, one from another, by virtue of logical

connections among them Nor do they arise in the mind by

virtue of some mental power of the mind James Mill, like

Hume before him, rejected a distinctive law of

ciation of the form of causes and effects, since such an

asso-ciation reduces to contiguity of ideas Similarity among

ideas, too, is not a law apart from the regular or habitual

association of ideas, due merely to their contiguity or

co-occurrence

Bain further systematized associative laws, added an

articulation of psychophysical parallelism, and expanded

the physiological basis of psychological processes first

introduced in Hartley’s account of association of ideas as a

special instance of Newton’s theory of vibrations

From its sources in Locke’s use of the phrase

‘associ-ation of ideas’ (in a discussion of the intellectual errors and

sources of biased belief due to illogical, merely associative

relations among our ideas), associationism developed into

an account of the dynamic relations in the ‘stream of

con-sciousness’ and mental activity generally Historians of

psychology credit associationism as the beginning of

experimental psychology, in contrast to speculative,

philosophical psychology In philosophy, associationism

was vigorously criticized by the British thinkers

influ-enced by Kant and then Hegel (e.g T H Green, F H

Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, and others) However, in

recent philosophy of psychology inspired by the

connec-tionist or *parallel distributed processing model of the

functioning of the mind–brain, some principles of mental

activity with very strong echoes of associationism have

been noted and, perhaps, exploited d.g

E B de Condillac, Traité des sensations (1754).

Revd J Gay, ‘Dissertation on the Fundamental Principle of

Virtue’, preface to Archbishop King, Origin of Evil, tr

Arch-deacon Law (c.1731).

John Stuart Mill, System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (1843).

astrology.Up to the seventeenth century astrology

over-lapped with astronomy and *cosmology All studied the

movements of heavenly bodies, assuming a Ptolemaic

model of a finite universe composed of concentric circles

with a motionless earth (neither rotating nor revolving) at

the centre Astrology is associated mainly with theories of

celestial influences, understood as causal forces literally

flowing down on to the static earth and bringing about all

aspects of meteorological and biological change—winds, tides, and seasons, and generation, growth, corruption, and death Astrology found a place in the deterministic view of nature woven into ancient philosophical sys-tems—Aristotelian, Platonic, and Stoic—and their medieval and Renaissance derivatives From antiquity, astrological practice supported *fatalism, especially with the entry into medieval western Europe of Arabic sources Casting horoscopes and ‘fortune-telling’, with its claims to relate a detailed pattern of the heavenly bodies at birth to all future events of one’s life, was accused of denying *free will, but condemnations did little to lessen astrology’s popularity Once the earth was shown to be a rotating and revolving planet, once an infinite universe replaced a finite one, and once genetics placed the causes for biological diversity and specificity within the organism rather than

in the stars, there could be no scientific foundation for

J D North, Stars, Minds and Fate (London, 1989).

D Pingree, ‘Astrology’, Dictionary of the History of Ideas

(New York, 1973)

ataraxia.Freedom from trouble or anxiety In Epicurean

theory, one of the two constituents of *eudaimonia, the

other being freedom from bodily pain Since for Epicurus the absence of pain or distress was the highest form of

pleasure, this conception of eudaimonia was not merely

negative The elimination of anxiety, in particular of the fear of death and the afterlife, was for *Epicureans the principal motivation for the study of philosophy It was also adopted as their end by the *Sceptics, who held that

it was to be attained by suspension of judgement

c.c.w.t

A A Long and D N Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers

(Cam-bridge, 1987)

atheism and agnosticism.Atheism is ostensibly the doc-trine that there is no God Some atheists support this claim

by arguments But these arguments are usually directed against the Christian concept of God, and are largely irrele-vant to other possible gods Thus much Western atheism may be better understood as the doctrine that the Chris-tian God does not exist

Agnosticism may be strictly personal and confessional—

‘I have no firm belief about God’—or it may be the more ambitious claim that no one ought to have a positive belief for or against the divine existence Perhaps only the ambi-tious version invites an argument A promising version might combine something like William Clifford’s dictum that no one ought to hold a belief on insufficient evidence with the claim that the existence of God is evidentially indeterminable Both of these claims, of course, have been

*God, arguments against the existence of; God and the philosophers; religion, scepticism about; religion, his-tory of the philosophy of; religion, problems of the phil-osophy of

64 associationism

William Clifford, ‘The Ethics of Belief ’, in Antony Flew (ed.),

The Presumption of Atheism (London, 1976).

Bertrand Russell, Why I am not a Christian (New York, 1957).

atomism, logical.A phrase used by Russell (in his paper

‘Analytic Realism’ (1911), 135) for a position he most fully

characterized in 1918: the world is made up of logical

atoms, ‘little patches of colour or sounds, momentary

things predicates or relations and so on’ (‘Lectures on

the Philosophy of Logical Atomism’ (1918), 179), together

with the facts composed of these atoms Atomism as a

theory of matter dates back to the ancients Hume’s

atom-ism is psychological: the ultimate constituents of the

world are perceptions (impressions and ideas) Russell

calls his atoms logical because they have the logical, but

not the metaphysical, features of substances: they are the

ultimate simple subjects of predication, but they do not

endure through time He calls the process of discovering

the atoms ‘logical analysis’ Reflection shows that

Pic-cadilly is not an ultimate simple, and that judgements

apparently about it are really about its simple

con-stituents Another reason which Russell might have had

for calling his atomism logical is that logical techniques are

involved in constructing the complexes out of the simples:

complex facts are constructed out of atomic facts, and

complex things are classes constructed out of the atoms

Russell’s atomic things are *sense-data, and as

short-lived as Hume’s perceptions Yet Russell denies that one

can infer from this that they are mental In the 1918

account, he speaks sympathetically, though without fully

committing himself, of neutral monism, the theory that

the atoms are neither mental nor physical, the distinction

emerging only through the different kinds of ways in

which the atoms are combined into complexes Logical

atomism has no commitment to idealism

An atomic fact is one properly expressed by a sentence

in which there are no logical connectives Thus ‘This is

red’, if true, states an atomic fact, whereas ‘This is red or

green’ does not Sentence form alone cannot be relied

upon Thus ‘Tom is married’ does not state an atomic fact,

since it really means ‘Tom is married to someone’, and this

is a general fact, involving existential quantification

Hence logical atomism is associated with the need for

philosophical analysis: in order that the real nature of facts

can be seen, sentences have to be analysed into their

logical form

The purest atomistic vision concerning facts is

pro-vided in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and is the view that all

facts, or all basic facts, are atomic, and every atomic facts

independent of every other For example, there are not

really any disjunctive facts, facts of the form: p or q For ‘p

or q’, if true, is made true by the fact that p or by the fact

that q There is no need to posit any further fact, over and

above the fact that p or the fact that q, to make ‘p or q’ true.

Problems for this view include: the independence of

atomic facts, the nature of negative facts, and whether

general facts and facts of propositional attitude are

reducible to atomic facts

Wittgenstein himself abandoned the Tractarian vision because he felt that the best candidates for atomic facts

were not independent Thus this is red and this is green are

incompatible, but apparently atomic Russell argued that

universally general facts are sui generis, contradicting

Wittgenstein’s view that all facts, or all basic facts, are atomic Even if we were to enumerate all the atomic facts,

we would have left something out if we did not add that

these are all the facts there are, and this further fact is not

atomic Russell also argued that facts of *propositional attitude, for example the fact that John believes that this is red, are not atomic (since they include a complete sen-tence, here ‘This is red’), and are also not reducible to

B Russell, ‘Analytic Realism’, in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vi (London, 1992), 133–46; first pub as ‘Le Réalism analytique’, Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie

(1911)

—— ‘Lectures on the Philosophy of Logical Atomism’, in

Bertrand Russell: Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901–1950, ed R C Marsh (London, 1965), 178–281; first pub in Monist (1918,

1919)

L Wittgenstein, ‘Elementary Propositions’ (1932), in R Rhees

(ed.), Philosophical Grammar, tr A Kenny (Oxford, 1974),

210–14

—— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), tr D F Pears and

Brian McGuinness (London, 1961)

atomism, physical. A theory of the physical world, according to which it is constituted by an infinite number

of indivisible corpuscles moving randomly in an infinite void Initiated in the fifth century bc by Leucippus and Democritus, it was adopted by Epicurus, and via the redis-covery of *Epicureanism in the Renaissance developed into the ‘corpuscular philosophy’ of the seventeenth

*Diodorus Cronus

C Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus (Oxford, 1928).

atomism, psychological.The view that the ultimate con-tents of the mind consist in self-standing items owing their significance to no other mental items The psychological atoms are arrived at by breaking down complex thoughts into their simpler parts This is achieved by psychological discrimination not logical analysis (*Logical atomism.) When the thinker can distinguish no further separation of parts what remains are the atomic simples b.c.s

D Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed P H Nidditch, 2nd edn.

(Oxford, 1978), i i 1

atonement.According to this Christian doctrine, the life and death of Jesus make an important contribution to reuniting human sinners with *God Various theological accounts of this contribution have invoked the motifs of a victory in battle over personal or impersonal forces of evil, ransom paid to liberate sinners from the devil, payment of

a debt of punishment sinners cannot pay, a sacrifice sin-ners can offer God, and an example of love that inspires

atonement 65

repentance Human wrongdoers may and often should

make atonement to their victims p.l.q

*forgiveness

R Swinburne, Responsibility and Atonement (Oxford, 1989).

attention. As William James says, ‘consciousness goes

away from where it is not needed,’ and it seems an

every-day truth that one can selectively consider, concentrate,

or focus on some aspect of the world or of one’s inner life

Searle draws a distinction between the centre and the

periphery within the field of consciousness, arguing that

there are different levels of attention—from the full

atten-tion I pay to my feet when putting on my shoes to the

mar-ginal attention due to them the rest of the day How

attention stands vis-à-vis a clear conception of

conscious-ness, though, is a matter of debate It seems possible to be

conscious of something without attending to it One

might be conscious of the background murmurings at a

party, for example, while attending exclusively to the

host’s speech Despite this, the term is often used as a

syno-nym for ‘consciousness’ in what can only be incomplete

functional, cognitive scientific, or psychological accounts

attitude.In a broad sense, any mental state with

propos-itional content Attitudes, in this sense, include beliefs,

desires, hopes, and wishes On one view, the content of

any attitude is a traditional (declarative) *proposition, or a

corresponding mental *representation A person may

believe that AIDS is curable, desire that AIDS is curable,

hope that AIDS is curable, and so on In each case, the

con-tent is the same On another view, some different kinds of

attitudes have different kinds of content The contents of

desires, for example, might be ‘optative propositions’ (e.g

‘Would that AIDS were curable’), whereas the contents of

beliefs are declarative in form Some accounts of attitudes

replace propositions with situations Attitudes are

some-times characterized, more narrowly, as thoughts or

feelings possessing an affective tone and encompassing

*emotion and feeling

J Fodor, Psychosemantics (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).

attitude, aesthetic:see aesthetic attitude.

attribute:see substance and attribute.

Augustine, St(354–430) Bishop of Hippo Regius (now

Annaba, Algeria), Doctor of the Western Church His

enormous influence on the doctrines of Western

Chris-tianity owes much to his skill and perseverance as a

philosopher In the history of philosophy itself he is a

sec-ondary figure, partly because he didn’t have the taste or

leisure to acquire more than a scrappy knowledge of the

800-year tradition preceding him

As a young student at Carthage he formed the

ambi-tion, according to his Confessions (397–400), to lead a

philo-sophical life pursuing truth The opportunity to fulfil this ambition came when, aged 31, he resumed his childhood Christianity at Milan (386) and gave up his career as a schoolmaster With some friends he spent a winter at Cassiciacum by the north Italian lakes, discussing philoso-phy and composing dialogues on scepticism, the happy life, and the soul’s immortality Returning from there (388) to his birthplace Thagaste in Numidia (Souk-Ahras, Algeria),

he set up a community of young disciples and wrote on the problem of *evil, order, prosody, and language and learning But that life soon ended, when the Catholic con-gregation at Hippo on the Numidian coast prevailed on him in 391 to become their presbyter and later bishop From then on he was never free of pastoral business He

by no means stopped writing (his written output, nearly all of which survives, is bulkier than from any other ancient author), but the subject-matter became mainly polemical, against schismatics and heretics Even his

mas-terpieces, the Confessions and City of God (413–26), have a

pastoral purpose, the one being a public meditation on his own slow road to Catholic Christianity, and the other an attack (which was to have important historical effect) on the pretensions of pagans to possess a valuable independ-ent culture At the end of his life he catalogued and reviewed ninety-three of his works, excluding the

numer-ous sermons and letters, in his Retractationes (426–7).

In spite of his hostility to the pagan past, Augustine was formed by classicism (all through Latin—he hardly read Greek), and he commended its contributions to know-ledge and helped to transmit some of its flavour to the Western Middle Ages In philosophy the chief influence

on him was Platonist

The *Platonism came from Plotinus For Augustine, as for the circle from whom he imbibed it during the Milan years (384–7), it was a route to Christianity, rescuing him from Cicero’s scepticism and from the materialism and good–evil dualism of the Manichees, whose sect he had joined at Carthage Now he could agree with ‘the Platonic philosophers, who said that the true God is at once the author of things, the illuminator of truth, and the giver of

happiness’ (City of God, 8.5) He could believe that there

are three ‘natures’ or kinds of substance: bodies, mutable

in time and place; souls, incorporeal but mutable in time;

and *God, incorporeal and immutable (De Genesi ad Litteram (c.410), 8 20 39) God makes everything, and all

that he makes is good Badness arises from the tendency of things to decay: ‘for a thing to be bad is for it to fall away

from being (deficere ab essentia) and tend to a state in which

it is not’ (De Moribus Manichaeorum (388), 2 2) The

‘ordin-ary course of nature’ is the regular and planned unfolding

of causal or ‘seminal’ reasons, which date from the

cre-ation when God ‘completed’ his work (De Genesi ad Litteram, 9 17 32, 6 11 18–19).

Like Plato’s *Form of the Good, Augustine’s God is not only the cause of things’ being but the cause of our know-ing them God illuminates truths as the sun illuminates visible things The senses do not supply knowledge,

because their objects are mutable (Soliloquia (386–7), 1 3 8).

66 atonement

But understanding (which is the actualization of

know-ledge) can be compared to vision as the successful exercise,

like successful looking, of the faculty of reason, which is

like sight, in the presence of God or wisdom, which is like

light (Soliloquia, 1 6 12–15) This analogy with one of the

five senses was enough to convince Augustine that

knowledge is enlightenment by God, the only teacher

who can do more than provide an occasion for learning

(De Magistro, 389).

Platonism also helped to shape Augustine’s views

about the relation of men and other animals to their souls

(animae), at least to the extent of persuading him that souls

are incorporeal, against the *Stoic influence that had been

felt by some earlier Christians Soul, he thought, is a

nature, or substance (De Trinitate (400–20), 2 8 14), and he

was content to believe that until the general resurrection

the souls of the dead will ‘live’ without bodies (City of God,

13 19) But confronting the question whether a man not

yet dead ‘is both [a body and a soul], or only a body, or

only a soul’ (De Moribus Catholicae Ecclesiae (388), 4 6) he

chose the first answer, while also confessing that ‘the way

in which spirits adhere to bodies and become animals is

altogether mysterious’ (City of God, 21 10 1) The

adher-ence may be like mixture of light with air, but perhaps

should not be called mixture at all (Epistulae, 137.7.11).

In brooding on scepticism Augustine gradually came to

think that even the tough ‘criterion’ of knowledge that

had been agreed, seven centuries before, between Stoics

and their adversaries the Academic *Sceptics could be

sat-isfied by assent to ‘I exist’ and ‘I am alive’ In scattered

pas-sages of his works we can see developing an argument

that finds final, Descartes-anticipating form at City of God,

11.26: ‘if I am wrong, I exist (si fallor, sum)’—hence

one’s own existence is something one cannot believe in

erroneously

Augustine made some casual remarks about

language-learning in the Confessions, but also discussed language

quite thoroughly elsewhere He accepted the standard

view that speech ‘signifies’, not only in the sense of

indi-cating thoughts (and perhaps things) but also, apparently,

in the sense of representing the structure of thoughts in its

own verbal structure, each unit of thought being itself a

word ‘that we say in the heart’ (De Trinitate, 15 10 19), not

in any language The theme of such inner words seemed

to him important enough to be gently and lucidly

expounded in more than one sermon

Among the Christian controversies which he entered

into with great zest and skill were some that involved the

major philosophical themes of *time and *free will Both

Manichees and pagans had mocked the Genesis story of

Creation In Confessions, and City of God, 11–12, Augustine

met the pagan challenge ‘Why did God create then?’ with

a response inherited from Philo Judaeus that God made

time too It then follows—or at any rate Augustine

asserted—that God himself, being beginningless, must be

outside time: his years do not pass but ‘stand

simultan-eously’ (Confessions, 11 13 16) Augustine proceeded to

treat Aristotle’s puzzle how times can exist, seeing that all

of them are past or future or durationless Starting from the insight that we measure times by memorizing their length (as when, in reciting the long syllables of the hymn

‘Deús creátor ómniúm’, we remember the duration of the short syllables and double it), he speculates whether times

are affections of the mind (Confessions, 11 27 36).

Augustine saw human free will—more exactly free

decision, or perhaps free control, of the will, liberum volun-tatis arbitrium—as essential to Catholic theology because

otherwise an almighty God, exempt from the limitations

of Manichaean dualism, could not be justified in tolerating ill deeds and punishing ill-doers The latter requires

ori-ginal guilt, oriori-ginalis reatus, so that the sin we inherit from Adam must be ‘penal’ (De Peccatorum Meritis (411), 1 37.

68); and both require the two-way power of acting and not acting, a ‘movement of the mind free both for doing and

for not doing’ (De Duabus Animabus (392–3), 12 17) In

De Libero Arbitrio (391–5) and City of God, 5, Augustine

made useful moves towards reconciling such freedom of decision with divine foreknowledge

By the 390s he also believed, and later against Pelagius felt obliged to proclaim, that men are not able to ‘fulfil the

divine commands’ without God’s aid (De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio (426), 15 31), nor even to ‘will and believe’ aright without God’s ‘acting’ (De Spiritu et Littera (412), 34 60).

To those who receive them these benefits come as grace, unmerited, and God’s will in bringing them ‘cannot be

resisted’ (De Corruptione et Gratia (426), 14 45) Yet it seems

that what cannot be resisted is not received freely and—in one mood—Augustine at last confessed that though ‘I tried hard to maintain the free decision of the human will,

the grace of God was victorious’ (Retractationes, 2 1).

In one of his two works about lying Augustine criticized

*consequentialism as a decision procedure on the ground

of its neutrality between doing ill oneself and acquiescing

in the ill deeds of others He advised that a Christian in penal times threatened with sexual abuse unless he sacri-ficed to pagan gods ‘more ought’ to avoid ‘his own sin than somebody else’s, and a lesser sin of his own than a

graver sin of somebody else’s’ (De Mendacio (396), 9 14).

Although this is not a licence to ‘wash your hands’, it does mean that sins cannot be exculpated by their good conse-quences Augustine doggedly inferred that lies, being sin-ful, are never justified But like St Paul disavowing ‘Let us

do ill that good may come’ (Romans 3: 8), he did not pause

to ask how sins or ill deeds are to be recognized: homicide, for example, he thought only sometimes sinful, because it

is permitted to properly authorized soldiers (Contra Faus-tum (400), 22 70) and executioners (City of God, 1 21).

Augustine shared the *asceticism common among Christian and pagan intellectuals of his time In particular sexual activity, and therefore marriage, would not fit well with philosophy In his twenties he lived with a woman (he never names her), the mother of his son; and he says in

the Confessions that what chiefly held him back from the

plunge into Christianity was desire for a woman’s arms (6 11 20) As a bishop he commended to others the partnership of marriage, but even more highly he

Augustine, St 67

commended marital continence and virginity There was

something inescapably low about sex.

Beginning as a champion of religious toleration,

August-ine was gradually drawn into a campaign by the Catholics

of north Africa to encourage state coercion of the

schis-matic Donatist Church, a popular and turbulent

move-ment in the area His chief motive may have been the

same as later persuaded English liberals like Locke to stop

short of advocating toleration of Roman Catholics: civil

peace His attitude to the Roman imperial power,

Chris-tian since forty years before his birth, was compliant No

one should despise the services it continued to render in

increasingly ‘barbarian times’, while release from its evils

must await the end of life’s pilgrimage in this ‘earthly city’

and the home-coming of the saved to heaven c.a.k

A H Armstrong (ed.), The Cambridge History of Later Greek and

Early Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1967), chs 21–7.

P R L Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London, 1967).

H Chadwick, Augustine, Past Masters (Oxford, 1986).

C A Kirwan, Augustine, Arguments of the Philosophers

(Lon-don, 1989)

J M Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge,

1994)

E Stump and N Kretzmann (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to

Augustine (Cambridge, 2001).

Aurelius, Marcus (ad 121–80) Roman Emperor

ad 161–80, and the last great Stoic writer of antiquity His

Meditations, twelve books of unsystematic private

reflections on life, death, conduct, and the cosmos, appear

to have survived fortuitously Their unique value is to

show us what it would be for a man at the apex of human

power to live honourably, deliberately, and sensitively in

accordance with the world-view and moral principles of

*Stoicism: that the All is one great natural system having

order and excellence as a whole; that man should seek to

understand this order, should accept what is inevitable for

himself, and should act with understanding and integrity

towards others The Meditations are immensely readable

at any point of entry They are available in numerous

English translations There is no hint in them that Stoic

thought was about to be overwhelmed by superstition

and its ethic absorbed into the Christian tradition

j.c.a.g

A R Birley, Marcus Aurelius, 2nd edn (Dordrecht, 1987).

F W Bussell, Marcus Aurelius and the Later Stoics (Edinburgh,

1910)

Aurobindo, Ghose (1872–1950) Cambridge educated

Indian nationalist, sent to prison for anti-British

‘terror-ism’ In prison he had life-transforming mystical

experi-ences His voluminous English writings on Hindu

philosophy and Indian culture deeply influenced

under-standing of India’s spiritual traditions in terms of

Euro-pean thought He combines traditional elements of the

theistic philosophy of *Bhagavadgı¯ta¯, contemporary

sci-ence, and his own mystical encounter with God, into an

original teleological or evolutionary metaphysics which

can be summarized as follows The evolution of matter into life and mind suggests that the individual ‘psyche’ too can further elevate itself, through ‘integral yoga’, into

an ‘overmind’ This overmind can then commune with the ‘supermind’, eventually merging with Existence– Consciousness–Bliss, the Ultimate Reality called ‘Brah-man’ in Sanskrit The present world with all its distinc-tions and disharmonies is real, but awaits the compensating descent of divine life which will gradually lead to spiritual perfection for every individual The empirically inscrutable ‘logic of the infinite’ ensures that this supramental descent will make all life

*Indian philosophy

Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine (Pondicherry, 1983).

Austin, John(1790–1859) Lawyer and first Professor of Jurisprudence at London University, his lectures on the philosophy of law gave wide and long-lasting currency to Bentham’s *legal positivism

Austin wanted his leading terms to have the simplicity, fewness, and definiteness of geometry’s, so that political theory, like the distinct utilitarian ‘science of legislation’, could be popularly understood Acknowledging Hobbes,

he therefore defined positive law as commands of sover-eigns (supreme political superiors habitually obeyed in independent political societies)—observing more clearly than Bentham the definition’s unwelcome entailments: e.g much constitutional law is merely ‘positive morality’ (distinguished in his useful terminology from ‘critical morality’), and sovereigns have no legal rights Hart’s cri-tique attributes to oversight or muddle much that Austin understood well but was obliged, by his (vulnerable) method and definitions, to exclude from ‘analytical

*law, philosophy of; law, positive

John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, ed and intro.

H L A Hart (London, 1954)

Austin, John Langshaw(1911–60) Philosopher reputed

to have led a movement giving rise in the 1950s and 1960s

to *‘linguistic philosophy’ Austin’s career was in Oxford, where he held a Chair from 1952 until his death at the age

of 48 (This was the White’s Chair of Moral Philosophy, although that was not a subject in which he had a particu-lar interest.) Austin held no general theories about language or philosophy or method; his reputation is owed to his concern sometimes to approach philosophical problems through an examination of the resources of

‘ordinary language’, to his characteristic style of writing (at once plain and witty), and to his great influence on his contemporaries His approach to philosophical problems

is illustrated in his idea that ‘much of the amusement, and of the instruction, comes in drawing the coverts of the microglot, in hounding down the minutiae’: he believed that a good treatment of a topic began with a taxonomy Austin’s overall views on philosophical subjects are

68 Augustine, St

robustly realist, and, in epistemology at least, he was

inclined to think of problems as manufactured by

philosophers

Three books appeared posthumously Philosophical

Papers (Oxford, 1961; 2nd edn 1970) is a collection, which

covers some epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy

of action Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford, 1962) argues that a

series of alleged problems about perception are bogus

How to Do Things with Words (Oxford, 1961) is the revised

text of the William James Lectures that he gave at Harvard

in 1955; this gave rise to the theory of speech-acts, which

has a continuing influence in philosophy, in linguistics,

*Oxford philosophy; linguistic acts

G L Warnock, J L Austin (London, 1989).

Australian philosophy.New South Wales was claimed

for Britain by Captain Cook in 1770, and a penal colony

established there in 1788 Ninety-eight years later, the first

chair in philosophy was established in the new colony of

Victoria at the University of Melbourne While there have

been recent attempts by feminist theorists and some

moral philosophers to address the issues of justice for

indigenous people and to call for recognition of the special

relationship the first peoples have with the land, the

continent’s philosophical development owed most of its

inspiration to links with Britain and Europe, later with the

United States Contemporary Australian work has a

strongly ‘analytic’ flavour and robust academic links with

New Zealand philosophy

John Anderson’s arrival in Sydney in 1927 ended forty

years of idealist dominance in Australian philosophy

Obstinately realist, Anderson’s thought was hostile to

many of the conventional views of the age, championing

an idiosyncratic form of ‘empiricism’ (one excluding both

sense-data and ideas) Few others had such an influence on

the subject’s Australian development, although, thanks to

invitations arranged by J J C Smart, two visitors to the

country had a more recent influence: first, Donald

David-son, and subsequently, David Lewis, the latter making no

less than twenty-five visits to Australia from the Seventies

onwards While Anderson’s influence was local, the

dom-inant figures in Australian philosophy of the second half of

the twentieth century—including J J C Smart, David

Armstrong, Frank Jackson, and Philip Pettit—held sway

not only at home but also world-wide

Anderson’s views, however polemical, were always

cast in systematic form Poised against his system building

was Sydney’s historic rival, Melbourne Stranded there

during the Second World War, George Paul fuelled the

competition between the two centres by spreading the

doctrine of the later Wittgenstein, a task continued by

Douglas Gasking, who even translated Wittgensteinian

doctrine ‘into Sydney’ to facilitate its dissemination By

the early Fifties, some thought that the Sydney conception

of philosophy as a systematic investigation into the nature

of things was finished

In 1950 Smart was appointed to the chair of philosophy

at Adelaide In turn, Smart appointed U T Place and

C B Martin Place converted Smart from a Rylean to a materialist view, and was the first to publish—in 1956—an account of the new ‘identity theory of mind’ (often called

‘Australian materialism’) The new theory was not only championed by Smart, but later developed, under Armstrong, into a fully-fledged ‘central-state materialism’ claiming that all mental processes are simply physical processes in the brain Martin, who introduced into Aus-tralia the concept of truth-maker (that, whatever it is, in virtue of which a proposition, or other truth-bearer, is true), favoured a double-aspect view of the mental in pref-erence to straight reductionism The Adelaide-based argu-ments about materialism constituted a golden age in the development of Australian metaphysical realism—a pos-ition that still pervades much of contemporary Australian writing Place left Australia in 1956, but not until 1982 did the most significant Australian objection to the reduction

of the mental to the physical appear, in Jackson’s appealing thought experiment Mary—a scientist with normal colour vision who has lived since birth in a black and white world—knows everything about the physics and physiology of colour perception, yet still, Jackson argued, she does not know what it is like to sense red While Anderson’s use of logic was restricted to a ver-sion of syllogistic reasoning, Melbourne had been largely indifferent to formal logic altogether However, from the Seventies onwards, a number of distinctive approaches to logic developed, focusing particularly on the fields of rele-vance and paraconsistent logic Several of the leading con-tributors to this logical turn included migrants—Richard Routley (later Sylvan) from New Zealand, Len Goddard and Graham Priest from the United Kingdom, and Bob Meyer from the United States Alongside this interest in logic, history and philosophy of science has also found a central place in both teaching and research in Australia, with recent studies in philosophy of biology by Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths complementing the focus on physics and problems of space and time of an earlier gen-eration of writers such as Graham Nerlich The history

of philosophy itself has received careful attention in the writings of John Passmore, Stephen Gaukroger, and Stewart Candlish

Work on moral and political philosophy was shaped to

an extent by migrant influence, though some of the best-known work in this area was carried out by Australians who chose to live overseas—for example, J L Mackie, famous for his defence of the ‘error theory’ of value in his

1977 book on Ethics Before then, Kurt Baier had

defended a robust moral objectivism, D H Monro had defended moral subjectivism, and Julius Kovesi had queried the ‘fact-value gap’ Many of the works on ethical and political theory originating from Australia after the Seventies championed forms of utilitarianism and conse-quentialism (in the hands, for example, of Smart, Pettit, and Robert Goodin), with C L Ten and Robert Young standing apart from this general trend Engagement with

Australian philosophy 69