The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 11 potx

The Marxian theory holds that human history makes the most sense if we understand it in terms of certain funda-mental tendencies, operating at the economic level: the tendency of product

regarding *God and God’s transcendence He had been

sickened by the course of theology and New Testament

study in the nineteenth century To Barth, it reduced God

and his self-revelation in Christ to the merely human, the

narrowly rational, the comfortably liberal Barth saw

him-self as standing in the tradition of Kierkegaard, Luther,

Calvin, Paul, and Jeremiah, prophetic figures for whom

‘man is made to serve God and not God man’ Religion

and piety were castigated by Barth along with natural

theo-logy as misguided, as attempts on the part of fallen

man to tame the otherness of God and to ‘bolt and bar

himself against revelation’

God, for Barth, is wholly other, inaccessible to human

thought and reason, who yet in Christ broke into the

human world ‘vertically from above’ It is at this point that

philosophers will want to press Barth How is it that

with-out some natural theology or initial inkling of God on our

part we can recognize Christ’s revelation as divine? And

how, in any case, could the Wholly Other express himself

in the human person who lived in Galilee two millennia

ago? Barth’s own logic forbids a direct answer to these

questions He appeals rather to the Pauline doctrine of

election by grace: that through divine grace and not

through any effort of ours some are brought (correctly) to

see the Word of God in the New Testament He calls this

the humiliation of the Gospel; it might equally be called

the humiliation of reason

Barth’s searching critique of *Enlightenment

rational-ism is refreshing, and not only in the theological field; but

it was followers of Barth who later went on to proclaim

the death of God from within the theological world

a.o’h

*God is dead

H Hartwell, The Theology of Karl Barth: An Introduction (London,

1964)

T F Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to his Early Theology

1910–1931 (London, 1962).

J Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth

(Cam-bridge, 2000)

Barthes, Roland(1915–1980) French literary and cultural

critic, elected chair of literary semiology at the Collège de

France in 1976, he appropriated and destabilized the

crit-ical methodologies of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure

and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the course of his

systematic investigation of signs and signifying systems

For him, language (and culture) is structured, but

‘off-centred without closure’, since signs are not mere

denot-ative units but polysemous, operating in a moving play of

signifiers that can generate meaning in relation to other

signifiers The text is then no static work but a rich,

dynamic field of explosive scraps of code capable of ‘the

infinite deferment of the signified’ Reading, then is, not

reductive deciphering but a productive activity analogous

to playing from a musical score This eliminates the

pos-sibility of any privileged interpretation, authorial or

crit-ical, but makes it possible to participate in a ‘hedonistic

textuality’, a paradoxical jouissance, where the psychically

split reader is at once lost and merged within a sea of

Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris, 1970).

—— Image–Music–Text, tr Stephen Heath (New York, 1977) Michael Payne, Reading Knowledge: An Introduction to Barthes, Fou-cault and Althusser (Oxford, 1997).

base and superstructure. According to the *historical materialism of Marx and Engels, the social ‘base’ is the ensemble of social relations or the economic structure of society; politics, law, morality, religion, and art constitute the social ‘superstructure’ In some writings, the term

‘superstructure’ is used to refer solely to people’s thoughts about their social relations (*‘ideology’), while in others it refers also to non-economic social institutions The pri-mary relation asserted in Marxian theory between the base and the superstructure is one of explanatory depend-ence: ‘superstructural’ phenomena are to be explained materialistically through their dependence on the eco-nomic base According to Marx, phenomena in the base can be understood with scientific precision, whereas superstructural phenomena are comparatively contin-gent, and admit of rigorous treatment only to the degree that they exhibit dependence on the economic base There is no coherent history of politics, law, religion, or art as such; people’s real history is economic

The reasoning behind these Marxian claims, and even their meaning, has been a matter of dispute among Marx-ian scholars and MarxMarx-ian theorists One reading, usually proposed by critics rather than proponents of Marxism, takes what is ‘superstructural’ to be ‘epiphenomenal’; that

is, superstructural phenomena exhibit causal dependence

on eco-nomic facts, but exercise no causal influence on the economic realm This implausible interpretation of histor-ical materialism was rejected by Engels, who insisted that although the dependent spheres of life ‘react’ on the eco-nomic realm, it is always the ecoeco-nomic ‘driving forces’ which are determining ‘in the last instance’ But this leaves unexplained why economic forces should be thought always to be decisively determining in causal interactions which are admittedly reciprocal

The Marxian theory is perhaps best understood if we take the primacy of the economic to be an assertion not about causal influences but about historical tendencies The Marxian theory holds that human history makes the most sense if we understand it in terms of certain funda-mental tendencies, operating at the economic level: the tendency of productive powers to grow over time and of the economic structure of society to adjust so as to facili-tate new productive powers The claim that forces of pro-duction are primary amounts to the claim that history makes most sense if we proceed from a pattern of explan-ation proceeding from the tendency to growth in pro-ductive forces; the explanations in question are functional

or *teleological, not causal, in form, though they do involve causal mechanisms through which the basic ten-dencies operate: the tendency of productive forces to grow and the tendency of production relations (and, along

80 Barth, Karl

with them, superstructural phenomena) to adjust to that

growth

The mechanism of such adjustments is the *class

strug-gle; that class is victorious whose ascendancy is most

con-ducive to the employment and further development of the

growing powers of production Superstructural

phenom-ena are then to be explained functionally by the way in

which they serve the prevailing economic structure, or the

interests of contending classes Clearly they could not serve

this function or these interests without exercising some

influence on the economic realm, and so they cannot be

merely ‘epiphenomenal’ Their historical development,

however, is best understood in relation to the fundamental

tendencies of human society, which are economic

a.w.w

G A Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History (Princeton, NJ, 1978).

Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge, 1985).

Ted Honderich, ‘Against Teleological Historical Materialism’,

Inquiry (1982).

basic action.An idea introduced in the philosophy of

action A person may do one thing by doing another, e.g.

vote by raising her arm Then raising her arm is said to be

more basic (or primitive) than voting That than which

noth-ing is more basic—i.e that which is not done by donoth-ing

something else—is the basic thing Variants on this idea

have been introduced, sometimes to protect accounts of

action from regress, sometimes to cast light on different

kinds of relation between different things agents do

If an action is a particular (an event such as Jane’s raising

of her arm at time t), and such particulars are coarsely

indi-viduated, then ‘more basic than’ and ‘basic’ do not really

apply to actions themselves: they apply to things done

when there are actions, things such as raising the arm or

voting (which are sometimes called acts) j.horn

*action

Jennifer Hornsby, Actions (London, 1980), chs 5 and 6.

basic statements.A statement, P, is a basic statement if and

only if P’s truth-value determines that of at least one further

statement, Q, but there is no statement R such that R

deter-mines the truth-value of P.

Paradigmatically, but not essentially, if P is a basic

state-ment then P’s truth-value is determined by the obtaining

or non-obtaining of some empirical state of affairs

*Empiricism about meanings logically entails the

exist-ence of basic statements but not vice versa

Neurath’s *protocol statements (Protokollsätze),

Wittgenstein’s elementary propositions (Elementarsätze),

and Russell’s atomic propositions are basic statements, but

we owe the expression ‘basic statement’ to Ayer s.p

A J Ayer, Philosophical Essays (London, 1959).

bat, what it is like to be a:see Nagel, Thomas.

Baudrillard, Jean(1929– ) French social theorist who

came to prominence in the early 1980s Baudrillard, whose

message is that the subject is dominated by the object, sees consumption as the prime mover in the social order, and takes our behaviour, language, and perceptual experi-ence to be increasingly formed by media-propagated ideals and images As a result, we live in a world of signs removed from any external reality that might help us to keep account of what we take to be signified In this

‘hyper-reality’ the real and the ‘televisual’ merge, and fan-tasy institutionally replaces reality Since the historical and causal contexts are lost to view too, the real distinctions, social, economic, etc., that the images might represent also disappear, and political life with them Baudrillard’s perspective owes much to his Continental predecessors from Marx onwards, with debts to J K Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan He marches under the same anti-meta-narrative banner as *Lyotard, but, nevertheless, consistently with his thought-provoking (or, as he might claim, thought-liberating) reversals of established ideas, denies that he is a *post-modernist a.h

J Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, tr P Beitchman and W G J

Nieslu-chowski (London, 1990)

M Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Stanford, Calif.,

1988)

Bauer, Bruno (1809–82) German theologian, philoso-pher, and historian, who was a leading Left Hegelian He attended Hegel’s lectures on religion, and contributed his notes for the posthumous edition of the lectures He began his career with a Right Hegelian attack on D F

Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1835–6), which saw the Gospels as

myth rather than history But in 1842 his conversion to religious radicalism lost him his professorship at Bonn He now argued that Christ was a fiction, and interpreted Hegel as an atheist and revolutionary, who deified human self-consciousness, notably that of the enlightened critic in contrast to the docile masses—a view more akin to the pre-Hegelian romanticism of Friedrich Schlegel than to Hegel himself Marx contested this and other doctrines of

Bauer in The Holy Family (1845). m.j.i

*Hegelianism; Romanticism

L S Stepelevich (ed.), The Young Hegelians: An Anthology

(Cam-bridge, 1983)

Bayesian confirmation theory. The most influential attempt in the logical positivist tradition to provide a uni-form, general account of scientific knowledge Bayesians identify the epistemic support *evidence confers on a hypothesis with *probability, usually understood in terms

of dispositions to take risks whose outcome would depend

on the correctness of the hypothesis of interest They sup-pose that background beliefs and expectations which may vary among investigators determine the extent to which any given evidence supports a hypothesis Someone who

evaluates a hypothesis (H) on the basis of evidence (E)

brings to its assessment (1) a prior degree of confidence in

H, (2) prior expectations concerning whether E should occur if H is correct, and (3) a prior degree of confidence

Bayesian confirmation theory 81

that E should (or shouldn’t) occur regardless of whether H

is true If B are the investigator’s background beliefs which

determine these expectations, Bayes’s theorem says the

probability of H, given E, should vary directly with (1) and

(2), and inversely with (3) In symbols,

Pr(H|E & B) [the probability of H, given B and E ]

= Pr(E|H & B)×Pr(H|B)

Pr(E|B) where Pr(H|B) corresponds to (1), Pr(E|H & B)

corres-ponds to (2), and Pr(E|B) correscorres-ponds to (3).

Bayesianism has its attractions: it avoids technical

diffi-culties which beset its rivals; it treats epistemic support

quantitatively; it seems to shed light on disagreements

(emphasized by Kuhn) among scientists over the

epi-stemic bearing of evidence It applies to reasoning from

uncertain evidence

The following are among Bayesianism’s problems: its

applications to real world cases are clouded by the

appar-ent arbitrariness of its assignmappar-ents of numbers to prior

degrees of confidence (1, 2, and 3 above) And it has trouble

explaining how a theory can be tested against old evidence

already accepted with certainty For such evidence,

priors (1) and (3) above are identical to 1 (complete

confi-dence) and therefore, by Bayes’s theorem, the probability

of the hypothesis, given the evidence, can be no different

from its prior probability What makes this a problem is

that old evidence can have great epistemic significance,

as illustrated by the support the general theory of

rela-tivity received from facts about Mercury’s perihelion

that were firmly established before Einstein proposed

*Logical Positivism

L Bovens and S Hartmann, Bayesian Epistemology (Oxford, 2003).

John Earman, Bayes or Bust? (Cambridge, Mass., 1992) thoroughly

examines strengths and weaknesses

Alan Franklin, Experiment, Right or Wrong (Cambridge, 1990)

applies Bayesianism to examples from physics

Colin Howson and Peter Urbach, Scientific Reasoning:

The Bayesian Approach (La Salle, Ill., 1989) is the standard

expo-sition

Bayle, Pierre(1647–1706) French scholar and

controver-sialist, best known for his Historical and Critical Dictionary

(1697) Through painstaking research into the lives and

thought of hundreds of biblical and historical figures,

Bayle subjected countless philosophical and religious

doc-trines to critical scrutiny, and demonstrated, with scathing

wit and dialectical virtuosity, that none of them had any

legitimate claim to the status of final truth He argued, in

direct opposition to the rationalist philosophers, that

reason was too feeble an instrument to be relied upon

in the pursuit of truth, but that religious faith, while

cru-cial to our support, had need of constraint and modesty in

advancing its own claims Bayle exerted a powerful

influence upon the eighteenth-century *philosophes, who

admired his intellectual courage, the rigour of his

scholarly methods, and his passionate commitment to the cause of religious toleration p.f.j

Elisabeth Labrousse, Bayle, tr Denys Potts (Oxford, 1983).

‘be’:see ‘to be’, the verb.

beatitude’s kiss:see Aurobindo, Ghose.

beauty.Despite its ancient aura as one of the supreme val-ues in human life and in the cosmos, some philosophers give beauty short shrift They remind us that discussions

of aesthetic matters often do not use the words ‘beauty’ or

‘beautiful’, and that, on the other hand, discussions involving these words are often not aesthetic If we call a person beautiful, is that always an aesthetic judgement? Presumably not, if desires towards the person are material

to the judgement So beauty is and is not something aes-thetic It can seem merely a vague way of praising some-thing: whether we have a beautiful time at a wonderful party, or vice versa, makes little difference

Philosophical aesthetics has tried to rescue the concept

of beauty, suggesting that it is the best general concept of

*aesthetic value The idea is that beauty applies to any kind of thing, whether an artefact or a part of nature, and that to judge anything beautiful is always the highest form

of aesthetic praise If ethics is an investigation of the good (despite the vagaries of the word ‘good’), then aesthetics is

an investigation of the beautiful However, are not some great works of art ugly? We must be careful here A work which depicts scenes that are gruesome and harrowing,

such as the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear, may

loosely be said to be ugly But whether the play depicts pleasant and beautiful things, and whether it succeeds aes-thetically, are obviously questions at two different levels

A similar point could apply to a piece of music which was discordant and unsettling to listen to Though not beauti-ful by conventional standards, such works acquire this epi-thet according to the theory that aesepi-thetic worth is beauty

Aquinas’s definition of beauty as ‘that which pleases in the very apprehension of it’ still commands some respect—provided that we can expand a little on what

‘pleases’ and ‘apprehension’ mean Taking pleasure in the perception of visible forms and colours, or combinations

of sound, are the most obvious candidates Beauty that is not perceptible is harder to accept, although this raises doubts about ‘a beautiful idea’ or ‘a beautiful mathemat-ical proof ’ To rule these out as expressions of approval which are not proper cases of aesthetic judgement seems

an unhappy solution Are grasping the structure of a math-ematical proof and the structure of a piece of music in sonata form so vastly different that one must be ‘aesthetic beauty’ while the other is not?

Another problem is what to say about the case of litera-ture, whose form is not strictly perceptible If literature may be aesthetically good (whatever point may ultim-ately attach to judging it so), and if ‘beauty’ is the term for aesthetic value, then we have to acknowledge that a

82 Bayesian confirmation theory

novel or short story can be beautiful, however strange

that may sound outside aesthetic theory Few would deny

that art of any form can be beautiful, but the idea that art

should be prized especially for its beauty, or that a purely

aesthetic way of regarding it is somehow privileged, may

be questioned Surely we care not only about beauty, but

also about such matters as whether a work has integrity,

whether it presents a view of the world that is honest or

enlightening rather than trivializing or lazy The view that

beauty alone matters in art is apt to be derided as an

assumption of *aestheticism On the other hand, if

absolutely any value that an artwork can have is included

in its being beautiful, then beauty really becomes a

vacu-ous idea for philosophical purposes c.j

*ugliness

I Kant, Critique of Judgement, tr J C Meredith (Oxford, 1969).

M Mothersill, Beauty Restored (Oxford, 1984).

Plato, Symposium, tr W Hamilton (Harmondsworth, 1972).

beauty above beauty:see Plotinus.

Beauvoir, Simone de:see de Beauvoir, Simone.

becoming:see change; process; time.

Bedeutung :see sense and reference; Frege.

beetle in the box.An example in Wittgenstein’s

Philo-sophical Investigations, § 293 If one wrongly construes the

grammar of sensation words on the model of name and

designated object, then the sensation drops out as

irrele-vant It would be like an object called ‘beetle’ in a private

box, which no one else could ever see, and hence could

play no role in explaining what the word means Instead,

Wittgenstein argued that to say that ‘S’ is the name of a

sensation is to say that the utterance ‘I have S’ is the

expres-sion of a sensation The logical grammar of sensation

words is fundamentally different from that of names of

objects or perceptual properties p.m.s.h

*Grammar, autonomy of

P M S Hacker, An Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical

Investigations, iii: Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind (Oxford,

1990), 206–8

begging the question, or petitio principii. Literally,

requesting what is sought, or at issue So, requesting an

opponent to grant what the opponent seeks a proof of So,

by extension, assuming what is to be proved A traditional

*fallacy Assuming has to be distinguished from entailing,

or all valid proofs would beg the question (as J S Mill

thought) But the boundary is sometimes hazy: for

example, does an argument of the form ‘Even if not P, Q;

so at any rate Q’ assume ‘Q’? (The expression is sometimes

misused: it does not mean ‘raise the question’, or ‘assume

J S Mill, A System of Logic (London, 1843), ii iii

behaviourism.A family of doctrines united by metaphys-ical worries about dualism and epistemic worries about the status of mental terms (even when not undergirded by

a dualistic metaphysic) *Operationalism, *positivism, and behaviourism were mutually inspiring doctrines designed, in the case of psychology, to make it scientific-ally respectable Psychology, traditionscientific-ally conceived as the science of mind, became conceived as the science of behaviour, where behaviour was understood to include only the ‘observable’ activities of an organism, or, in the version B F Skinner dubbed ‘radical behaviourism’, where behaviour was conceived of expansively so that

‘private events’ like thinking, feeling, and so on, although not directly observable were taken to be kinds of behav-iour subject to the same laws as more public, conspicuous behaviour Every type of behaviourism involved some sort of challenge to ‘mental realism’, to our ordinary way(s) of thinking of mind and mentality Some of the more interesting behaviouristic doctrines include the following:

Operationalistic behaviourism The meaning of a mental term is exhausted by the observable operations that deter-mine its use So ‘P is thirsty’ means P says she is thirsty if

asked, drinks water if given the chance, and so on

Logical behaviourism Mental terms are disposition terms To say that ‘P is thirsty’ is to imply, among other things, that P will probably say she is thirsty if asked, will

drink if given the chance, and so on The difference between the first and second doctrine is that the first denies any ‘surplus meaning’ to the concept of ‘thirst’ beyond that entailed by the observations used in the deter-mination to use it; whereas the second allows that the concept of ‘thirst’ is only partially reduced to the observ-able events that justify its use, and thus that it maintains a legitimate surplus meaning referring to a ‘state’ inside the organism, the qualitative state, say, of ‘being thirsty’

Methodological behaviourism Despite the fact that there

are private psychological events, ‘psychology’, conceived

as the science of behaviour, can avoid talking about them, and thereby retain its scientific credentials The basic idea

was pointed out by B F Skinner in Science and Human Behavior (1953) and was picked up and elaborated on by

Carl Hempel, who called it the ‘Theoretician’s Dilemma’ Assuming that unobservable private events serve to link stimuli and responses in lawlike ways, we can, for pur-poses of psychology, treat the mind as a black box, observ-ing the effects of the environment on behaviour, and predicting and explaining behaviour on that basis

Radical behaviourism The doctrine that behaviour can

be observable or unobservable (from the third-person point of view) but that both can be analysed within the substantive framework of behaviouristic psychology In

‘Behaviorism at 50’ (1964), Skinner writes: ‘It is especially important that a science of behavior face the problem of privacy It may do so without abandoning the basic pos-ition of behaviorism Science often talks about things it cannot see or measure The skin is not that important a boundary.’ With the advent of radical behaviourism, one

behaviourism 83

sees the attempt on Skinner’s part to argue for the thesis

that all behaviour, public or private, is governed by the

laws of classical conditioning (as articulated by Pavlov and

Watson) or operant conditioning (as articulated by

Thorndike and himself ) Skinner argued that thinking,

choosing, and deciding—things about which more

dra-conian forms of behaviourism vowed silence—could be

analysed as private behaviours with characteristic causal

relations to overt behaviour and as subject to the basic

principles of operant conditioning Despite this

expansive-ness, Skinner remained unimpressed until his dying day

with the rising tide of cognitive psychology, thinking it

lacked epistemic discipline and was rudely ignorant of the

contributions of the substantive doctrines of classical and

operant behaviourism Although no version of

behav-iourism is a live position within the philosophy of mind,

most philosophers still think that mental terms typically

get at least part of their meaning from links to observable

*functionalism; psychology and philosophy

Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, 1949).

B F Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York, 1953).

—— About Behaviorism (New York, 1974).

L D Smith, Behaviorism and Logical Positivism (Stanford, Calif.,

1986)

beingis the subject matter of *ontology According to

long tradition, there are kinds of being and modes of being.

The kinds of being may be subdivided in various ways: for

instance, into *universals and particulars and into

con-crete beings and abstract beings Another term for ‘being’

in this sense is ‘entity’ or *‘thing’ In a second sense, being

is what all real entities possess—in other words,

*exist-ence Being in this second sense has various modes Thus

the being of concrete physical objects is spatio-temporal

while that of abstract mathematical entities like numbers

is eternal and non-spatial Again, the being of some

entities (for instance, qualities) is logically dependent

upon that of others, whereas the being of substances is

logically independent

Connected with some of these traditional categorial

distinctions are certain grammatical distinctions

con-cerning the verb ‘to be’ The use of ‘is’ as a copula may be

interpreted in a variety of ways ‘This ring is yellow’

features the ‘is’ of attribution, since it ascribes a quality to a

substantial particular ‘This ring is golden’ involves the ‘is’

of constitution, as it states what kind of material that

particular is made of ‘This ring is my grandmother’s

wedding-ring’ features the ‘is’ of identity Finally, ‘This

object is a ring’ involves the ‘is’ of instantiation, since it

states what kind of thing the object in question is an

instance of Thus, although being yellow, being golden,

being my grandmother’s wedding-ring, and being a ring are

all properties of this ring, they are properties of very different

natures Moreover, none of these properties constitutes the

being of this ring, in the sense of constituting its exist-ence

‘This ring is (exists)’ apparently involves a sense of ‘is’

distinct from any in which ‘is’ functions merely as a copula

What is it to be a being or entity? Here we must distin-guish between the question what it is for an entity of any given kind to exist and the question what is the distin-guishing feature of entityhood The famous dictum of

W V Quine, To be is to be the value of a variable, is potentially confusing on this score It might be better phrased, ‘To be accounted amongst the entities recognized

as existing by a given theory is to belong to the domain assigned to the variables of quantification of that theory according to its standard interpretation’ But another well-known dictum of Quine’s, ‘No entity without identity’, goes nearer to the heart of our second question, suggest-ing that the crucial feature of entityhood is the possession

of determinate identity-conditions

In a special, restricted sense the term ‘being’ is com-monly used to denote a subject of consciousness (or self ), and thus a kind of entity to be contrasted with mere

‘objects’ Such entities are often supposed to enjoy a

spe-cial mode of being inasmuch as they are conscious of their

own existence and possess a capacity freely to determine its course—a view elaborated in the existentialist doctrine that, for such entities, ‘existence precedes essence’ (Sartre) The contrast between being (in the sense of existence) and *essence is itself an ancient one, rooted in the distinc-tion between accidental and essential properties Trad-itionally, God is an entity whose essence includes existence, making God a necessary being, and indeed the only such being in the restricted sense in which this signifies a subject

as opposed to an object But this doctrine seems to require one to think of existence as a property of individual beings, contrary to the now dominant view of existence developed by Frege and Russell e.j.l

*necessary and contingent existence; ‘to be’, the verb

E J Lowe, Kinds of Being (Oxford, 1989).

W V Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York,

1969)

J.-P Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr H Barnes (London,

1957)

being-in-the-world(In-der-Welt-sein) is, for Heidegger, the ‘determining character’ or ‘basic state’ of *Dasein (the

kind of being which humans have) The hyphens signal that it is a ‘unitary phenomenon’, for world (human) being and the relation of ‘being-in’ are only ‘provisionally’ distinguishable Human beings cannot be understood apart from a world that, in turn, is intelligible only as what they are ‘in’ The world, in this ‘primary’ sense, is not the spatio-temporal one of physics, but a ‘totality of signifi-cance’ which we are ‘in’, not as peas in a pod, but as mean-ingfully and practically engaged with (Compare ‘He’s in the world of motor-racing’.) Heidegger’s characterization

of our being challenges the view held by Descartes and many later philosophers that we are, in essence, ‘thinking things’ logically independent of a world of material, spa-tial substances It registers the conviction, shared by other

*phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, that human beings must be ‘primordially’ seen as immersed, through their meaning-giving ‘projects’, in a world whose

84 behaviourism

contours and articulation are themselves a function of

H L Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: Commentary on Heidegger’s

Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).

M Heidegger, Being and Time, tr J Macquarrie and E Robinson

(Oxford, 1962)

belief.A mental state, representational in character,

tak-ing a proposition (either true or false) as its content and

involved, together with motivational factors, in the

direc-tion and control of voluntary behaviour (*Thinking;

*propositional attitude; *representation.) Belief (thought)

is often (especially in the philosophy of mind) taken to be

the primary cognitive state; other cognitive and conative

states (e.g knowledge, perception, memory, intention)

being some combination of belief and other factors (such

as truth and justification in the case of knowledge)

In referring to beliefs—to Ted’s belief that snow is

white, for instance—one may be referring to either a

par-ticular mental state occurring in the believer (a state that

has content) or the propositional content

itself—some-thing more like a meaning that is not locatable in the

believer In the first case, Ted’s belief that snow is white is

not the same as Tom’s belief that snow is white They

occur in different heads In the second sense, they are the

same belief: that snow is white What Ted and Tom believe

(i.e the propositional content of their belief ) is the same

Beliefs involve the deployment of *concepts: one

can-not believe that something is a cow unless one

under-stands what a cow is and, in this sense, has the concept

cow (one needn’t, of course, understand the word ‘cow’)

One can, to be sure, have beliefs about cows (these are

called *de re or demonstrative beliefs) without knowing

what a cow is One can, for instance, believe that that

ani-mal, the one you see, is spotted If that animal happens to

be a cow, one believes of the cow that it is spotted and,

thus, has a belief about a cow But one cannot believe of

the cow (or of anything else for that matter) that it is a cow

(the word ‘cow’ here appears in what is called an oblique

or referentially opaque position) without understanding

what a cow is Since concepts can remain distinct even

when their reference is the same, belief descriptions are

*intensional in character

Some beliefs (called ‘core’ beliefs) are at the forefront of

consciousness—things one is, at the moment, actually

thinking about Others are not Even if you thought about

it once (when you learned geography), you were not

con-sciously thinking, a moment ago, that San Francisco is in

California None the less, it seems correct to say that you

believed it even when you weren’t actively thinking about

it Other beliefs seem even more remote from

conscious-ness, even more part of the background Even if you never

consciously thought about whether turtles wear pyjamas,

it seems right to say that you none the less believed they

did not wear pyjamas before your attention was ever

called to the fact

Beliefs, together with other mental states (desires,

fears, intentions) function as *reasons for action Thus,

beliefs are to be distinguished from a variety of other internal representations that control reflexes and other non-intentional behaviours There is a difference between closing your eyes as a reflexive response to a sudden movement (a response that is controlled by an internal representation of nearby events) and closing your eyes purposely, because you have certain desires (to avoid eye injury) and beliefs (that someone’s finger is headed for your eye)

There are two broadly contrasting views about the nature of belief content Individualists (sometimes called solipsists) maintain that the content of belief (what it is we believe when we believe something) supervenes on the neurobiology of the believer If two individuals are phys-ically indistinguishable, then they are psychologphys-ically indis-tinguishable They must, therefore, have the same beliefs Non-individualists, on the other hand, hold that belief con-tent is, at least in part, determined by the believer’s environment Two individuals that are physically identical could have different beliefs A version of non-individualism maintains that a person’s social—including linguistic— context helps fix the content of what they believe f.d

*belief and desire; judgement; mental causation; norms, epistemic;.virtues, doxastic

L R Baker, Saving Belief (Princeton, NJ, 1987).

A Phillips Griffiths (ed.), Knowledge and Belief (Oxford, 1967).

A Woodfield (ed.), Thought and Object (Oxford, 1982).

belief, ethics of.A set of rules used in evaluating doxastic states (beliefs, doubts, etc.) in ways similar to the evalu-ation of acts (murder, lying, etc.) by ordinary moral rules

An assumption is made that doxastic states are voluntary

in at least a weak sense Proponents of the ethics of belief are of two types: (1) epistemicists, who hold that the rules should refer only to epistemic considerations (sensory evi-dence, logical consistency, etc.), and (2) pragmatists, who hold that non-epistemic considerations (e.g saving a per-son’s life) are also relevant Among epistemicists, W K Clifford holds the extreme view that we never have a right

to believe a proposition without adequate evidence Among moderate epistemicists, R M Chisholm holds that we have a right to believe a proposition unless its con-tradictory is evident

Pragmatists also advocate more or less moderate views Pragmatic considerations should: (1) determine belief choice only when epistemic considerations are bal-anced pro and con or evidence is lacking, or (2) sometimes override a preponderance of evidence W James defended both types of pragmatic ethics of belief on

*norms, epistemic; virtue, doxastic

R Chisholm, The Foundations of Knowing (Minneapolis, 1982).

W Clifford, The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays, ed T Madigan

(Amherst, NY, 1999)

belief and desire.Familiar states of mind that do much theoretical work in some philosophical spheres and are

belief and desire 85

topics of philosophical analysis A popular way of

under-standing belief, desire, and the differences between them

features the notion of direction of fit It is said that the

defining aim of belief is to fit the world, whereas that of

desire is to get the world to fit it According to a notion of

satisfaction and a notion of content that apply to beliefs

and desires, a belief that p and a desire that p have the same

satisfaction condition—its being the case that p—and the

same content, p Philosophers who favour these notions

see beliefs and desires as differing in their respective

orien-tations toward their content Whereas many desires are

functionally fit to contribute to their own satisfaction,

relatively few beliefs are: potentially self-fulfilling beliefs

are the exception, not the norm Philosophers often

distin-guish occurrent from dispositional beliefs and desires

Where is New York City? Now that the issue has been

raised, you have an occurrent belief that NYC is in the

USA; before the issue was raised, you had a dispositional

belief that it is The same distinction applies to desires

‘Sam desires a career in philosophy’ is true even while he is

wholly absorbed in a tennis match or dreamlessly sleeping

When Sam’s supervisor, Sue, finds herself about to tell a

prospective employer that he definitely desires a career in

philosophy, she need not phone Sam to see whether he is

awake before she can be confident that she will be

speak-ing truly The quoted sentence is also true when Sam is

writing a cover letter for his job applications In the latter

case, but not the former, Sam has an occurrent desire for a

career in philosophy Beliefs come with degrees of

confi-dence, and desires with degrees of strength Both Sam and

Sue believe that he will get a philosophy job this year, but

she is more confident about that than he; and Sam’s desire

for a career in philosophy is much stronger than his desire

to eat the sandwich he is holding a.r.m

*simulation

J Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge, 1983).

belief-in.There are two main varieties of ‘belief-in’,

nei-ther of which is translatable in terms of ‘belief-that’ In the

first, ‘belief-in’ has a commendatory function (we do not,

save ironically, believe in someone’s incompetence,

disloy-alty, etc.) In the case of entities (though not of

abstrac-tions such as ideal states) this use of ‘believe in’ requires

the existence of the believed-in entity In the second,

‘believe in’ simultaneously notes and rejects a claim to

existence: ‘Children often believe in Santa Claus’, ‘James I

believed in witches’, etc Religion apart, first-person uses

of this sense of ‘believe in’ are rare, and carry with them an

acceptance of the need to justify the embedded

existence-claim The very terminology in which *belief in God

is claimed seems to reveal the need for a justification of

H H Price, Belief (London, 1969).

believe, will to:see will to believe.

Belnap:see Anderson and Belnap.

Bell’s theorem. Quantum mechanics (QM) predicts that various correlations will be observed between the outcomes of measurements on special types of two-component systems Bell’s theorem shows that these cor-relations are incompatible with a particular type of deter-ministic theory, one that seeks to explain the outcomes of the measurements in terms of local causal mechanisms The theorem also rules out local indeterministic theories The typical experimental set-up involves a physical sys-tem that consists of two, spatially separated subsyssys-tems,

A and B One is to measure some property of subsystem

A and simultaneously to measure some property of subsystem B If the system is deterministic, the (possibly

unknown) state of the total system before the experiment will determine the result of every such joint

measure-ment Locality is the assumption that, given the state of

the total system, the outcome of the measurement of a

particular property of subsystem A does not depend on which property of B is measured, or on the outcome of the measurement on B.

In 1964 John Bell showed that the assumptions of deter-minism and locality together imply that various inequal-ities should hold between the probabilinequal-ities of certain outcomes of various joint measurements The probabil-ities predicted by QM violate these inequalprobabil-ities It follows that any deterministic theory that recovers the statistical predictions of QM will violate locality and will thus involve ‘action at a distance’ (Bohm’s ‘hidden-variable’ interpretation of QM is an example of such a non-local deterministic theory.) Bell and others later generalized the result to show that indeterministic theories (so-called sto-chastic hidden-variable theories) that satisfy an appropri-ate locality condition are equally incompatible with the predictions of QM These predictions have since been verified, most famously by Alain Aspect and collaborators

in 1982 Whether this shows that nature itself is non-local

*Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen paradox; quantum the-ory and philosophy

J S Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics

(Cam-bridge, 1987)

J T Cushing and E McMullin (eds.), Philosophical Consequences of Quantum Theory (Notre Dame, Ind., 1989).

benevolence.To be benevolent is to be possessed by a desire for the good of others and a willingness to forward that good actively Since the good of others takes many different forms it requires a range of different responses Benevolence, therefore, may take the form of compas-sion, mercy, kindness, or generosity

While benevolence is quite properly understood as a general attitude of goodwill towards others and as the spe-cific forms such goodwill might take, the term has also come to be used more recently in a much narrower sense,

to refer to acts of charity An act of charity occurs when some benefit is freely bestowed by one individual with a surplus on another who is in need This narrowing of the

86 belief and desire

meaning of benevolence means what was initially a term

used to describe an uncontroversially desirable attitude to

others has come to be used, perhaps, to put a good face on

the largess of the better-off to the worse-off It thereby

introduces doubts about the moral value of benevolence

The question of the moral importance of benevolence

is often addressed by way of a comparison with the

alter-native major ‘other-regarding’ virtue, *justice

Benevo-lence is said to depend, for instance, on the agent’s feeling

concern for others, while the demands of justice are

rec-ognized by reason and are thus independent of the

vagaries of individual emotional capacity This particular

contrast owes a great deal to Hume’s influential account

of benevolence as a natural and essentially

sentiment-based virtue, which has led some to conclude that it is

inadequate to meet the demands of morality because it is

neither impartial nor, ultimately, open to rational

assess-ment There are, however, other conceptions of

benevo-lence which evade these criticisms *Utilitarianism, for

example, may be described as a theory of universal

benevo-lence, which refuses any necessary connection between

feeling and right action Neverthless, its highly stipulative

definition of benevolence is challenged by the Humean

recommendation that we ought to assess and be critical of

our moral relationships from the point of view of

senti-ment A second possible contrast between justice and

benevolence consists in the assertion that, because it is by

definition concerned with what is strictly due to others,

justice marks the boundaries of what we are morally

obliged to do, while benevolence consists in morally

desir-able, but in the final analysis optional, actions However,

this view merely reflects the largely unargued assertion

that justice is of overriding moral importance

To conceive of justice and benevolence as independent

and mutually exclusive in this way may be mistaken: the

two notions seem rather to be logically correlative and,

therefore, they cannot be explicated independently of

each other And if they are logically correlative, i.e related

not only at the level of certain particular conceptions of

each, but in all and any full and coherent conceptions of

either, then fully to understand a conception, or to

achieve a proper conception, of either justice or

benevo-lence requires making explicit the conception of the other

that it implies and from which it partly derives p.w

D Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ii.

T A Roberts, The Concept of Benevolence (London, 1973).

Benjamin, Walter(1892–1940) German philosopher and

literary and social critic, who was a member of the

*Frank-furt School He went into exile in Paris when the Nazis

came to power in 1933 After the fall of France he headed

for Spain, but was denied entry and killed himself

His cryptic, ambiguous, ironical writings owe as much

to messianic and kabbalistic Judaism as to Marxism and

surrealism Art serves theological, philosophical, and

political ends His essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) defends photography

and cinema, as a way of ‘politicizing’ aesthetics, against

the ‘aura’ of traditional art—to the annoyance of Adorno, who saw greater critical power in autonomous art than in the mass media Benjamin championed the revolutionary epic theatre of his friend Brecht He was a practitioner of

‘immanent criticism’: theoretical principles are to emerge from the work studied, not brought to it from outside He despised Heidegger, but such pieces as ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ and ‘Fate and

Charac-ter’, in One-Way Street (1928; tr London, 1979), have a

Hei-deggerian rather than a Marxian flavour: ‘The enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in folly’ and ‘Fate is the guilt

W Benjamin, Illuminations (New York, 1969).

—— Reflections (New York, 1986).

G Smith (ed.), Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History (Chicago,

1989)

Bennett, Jonathan F.(1930– ) Historian of philosophy, philosopher of language, and metaphysician, noted for his work on Kant, Spinoza, and the British Empiricists, as well

as on rationality, linguistic convention, conditionals, and the ontology of actions and events He rejects the widely assumed distinction between subjunctive and indicative

*conditionals and has challenged aspects of David Lewis’s work on counterfactuals He criticizes Davidson’s account of the individuation of actions and events and defends a role for both events and facts as admissible relata

of causal relations His work on the act–omission distinc-tion has had an important impact on the debate over active versus passive *euthanasia and the distinction between *killing and letting die Bennett is perhaps most renowned for his highly individual interpretations of major early modern philosophers, which have sometimes provoked controversy on account of his ahistorical

J Bennett, Events and their Names (Oxford, 1988).

—— Learning from Six Philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, 2 vols (Oxford, 2001).

—— A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals (Oxford, 2003).

Bentham, Jeremy(1748–1832) English philosopher who dreamed at a young age of founding a sect of philosophers called utilitarians and who lived to see his dream fulfilled

He also planned that his body when he died should be made into what he called an ‘auto-icon’ (that is, a repre-sentation of itself ) so that it could be used as a monument

to the founder of the sect This intention was also fulfilled,

so that to this day meetings of Benthamites sometimes take place in the actual presence of Bentham himself (who spends the rest of his time sitting in a glass box in Univer-sity College London)

Bentham was the son and grandson of lawyers working

in the City of London and was intended by his father to fol-low and surpass them as a practising lawyer However, while following his legal studies, Bentham became dis-gusted with the current state of English law and so, rather than making money by the practice of the law as it is, he

Bentham, Jeremy 87

turned instead to a study of what the law might be This

study formed the centre of his long life, during which he

wrote an enormous amount of manuscript material on

law, economics, politics, and the philosophy which

nat-urally arises from these subjects

In his earlier years Bentham turned some of this

manu-script into books, such as his Fragment on Government of

1776, or his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and

Legis-lation of 1789 (although, as the titles indicate, both of these

were in fact only parts of projected works) Later on, even

the fragments tended not to be published by him and were

left for others to edit In this manner, the first work which

made his name was produced in French and published in

Paris by his disciple Étienne Dumont of Geneva (the

Traités de législation civile et pénale of 1802) Dumont

subse-quently edited other works; these were translated into

English by disciples, who also edited others directly

Therefore much of the published text of Bentham has

passed through the hands of others, and also sometimes

been translated or retranslated prior to its publication In

fact, Bentham’s greatest work on the philosophy of law

was not published until the present century (in its latest

version, edited by H L A Hart, under the title Of Laws in

General).

Bentham’s grand project was for legislation: the

explor-ation and theoretical foundexplor-ations of a perfect system of

law and government For this he needed a measure of

per-fection, or of value; and this for Bentham was the principle

of *utility, otherwise known as the *greatest happiness

principle In his already mentioned Introduction to the

sub-ject, Bentham starts chapter 1 with the rousing declaration

that ‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of

two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.’ This first

para-graph ends with the statement that ‘the principle of utility

recognises this subjection, and assumes it for the

founda-tion of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric

of felicity by the hands of reason and of law’ Bentham’s

aim is to produce felicity, happiness The means to be

employed are ‘reason and law’: the right law will produce

happiness, and the right law is one in accordance with

rea-son This means one in accordance with the principle of

utility In Bentham’s draft codes of law, each particular

law was attached to a ‘commentary of reasons on this

law’ The commentary demonstrated its value and also,

Bentham hoped, improved its effect For, as he says

else-where, ‘power gives reason to law for the moment, but it

is upon reason that it must depend for its stability’

Bentham explicitly says in the Introduction that by

‘util-ity’ he means ‘that property in any object, whereby it

tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or

happiness or to prevent the happening of mischief,

pain, evil, or unhappiness’ The rightness of actions

depends on their utility; and the utility is measured by the

consequences which the actions tend to produce Of all

these varying terms describing the consequences, the

most important for Bentham are the ones with which he

began the Introduction, pleasure and pain For Bentham

thinks that these are clear, easily understandable terms,

which can therefore be used to give precise sense to the others So the good, for Bentham, is the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain Otherwise, as he

puts it in the Introduction, we would be dealing ‘in sounds

instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light’ For Bentham the principle of utility, interpreted in terms of pleasure and pain, is the only appropriate measure of value because it is the only comprehensible one

Bentham’s aim of increasing happiness is a practical one; and he had many purely practical proposals, such as for trains of carts between London and Edinburgh, or a Panama canal, or the freezing of peas But the most famous and important of these particular practical pro-posals was for a prison which he called the ‘panopticon’ It was to be circular so that the warders could sit in the cen-tre and observe all the prisoners It was also going to be privately run, by contract management with Bentham as its manager Bentham therefore not only intended to pro-duce what he called a ‘mill for grinding rogues honest’ but also to make money in the process In fact, blocked by the interests of the landowners whose property abutted the site of the proposed prison (now occupied by the Tate Britain Gallery on Millbank in London), he lost both money and time until, after twenty years’ struggle, he was compensated by Parliament Bentham took his winnings, rented a house in Devon, and instead of grinding rogues chopped logic, producing his most profound work on the philosophy of language

In his more general theory of government, just as in his more particular prison proposals, Bentham needed to rely

on a psychology This is that people tend to act in their own interests, where these are again understood in terms

of pleasure and pain People are understood to be seekers after pleasure and avoiders of pain Given this knowledge

of people’s psychology, the benign legislator can so arrange his system of law that people, seeking only their own interests, will in fact be led into doing what they are meant to do, which is to promote the general interest (or the greatest happiness for all)

From this follows the Benthamite theory of *ment It is a deterrent account The proper aim of punish-ment, as of anything else, is to produce pleasure and prevent pain Now all punishment is in itself a pain There-fore, for Bentham, all punishment is in itself a harm Therefore it can only be justified if this particular pain is outbalanced by the reduction in pain (or increase of pleasure) it causes If people are deterred by punishment from doing things which would produce more pain (such, for example, as rape, theft, or murder), then the punish-ment will be justified If not, not: there is no point in pun-ishment or retribution for its own sake This defence of punishment not only justifies punishment but also enables

in principle the precise calculation of how much punish-ment is appropriate It is that amount whose pain is out-weighed by the pains of the actions it deters

Bentham’s general account of law and punishment and his use of the principle of utility as a means of providing

88 Bentham, Jeremy

reasons for his particular codes of law is constant through

his life However, his ideas about the particular political

system which should be the source of this law developed

At the start he thought that he only needed to appeal to

enlightened governments for such obviously beneficial

arrangements to be put into effect When he found that

this did not happen (or that he was blocked in his own

pro-posals, such as that for the panopticon), he became a

sup-porter of democracy Not just the law had to be changed

but also the system of government He was accordingly

active in the movement for the extension of the

parlia-mentary franchise, which finally came into effect in the

year he died (although Bentham wanted something

con-siderably more radical than the extension which actually

happened: he wanted one man, one vote; and a secret

ballot)

Such democratic proposals were in any case much

more in accord with his general theories If, according to

the psychological theory, everyone acts in their own

inter-ests, so also do governments or governors The classic

eighteenth-century figure of the benevolent, semi-divine

legislator has to be dispensed with Dictators (supposedly

enlightened or otherwise), kings, oligarchies can not be

trusted The appropriate end of government, popularly

sloganized by Bentham as ‘the greatest happiness of the

greatest number’, is only safe in the hands of the greatest

number themselves If the people as a whole are granted

political power, they will, merely by following their own

interests, promote what is also the appropriate end Just

as in the right system of law, so in the right system of

pol-itics or government, actual and appropriate action will

coincide

It can be seen that Bentham’s project was centrally a

project of clarification He wanted to clarify values, to

show at what we ought to aim He wanted to clarify

psychology, to show at what people actually do aim He

wanted to devise the appropriate systems of government,

law, or punishment so that these two things could be

placed in step However, his interest in clarification went

further He also wanted to clarify the very idea of law;

both as a whole and also in its central terms It was in this

project that he was led into his most original thought

Understanding the law involves understanding such

things as *rights and duties In the empiricist tradition, to

which Bentham was loosely attached, understanding is

provided by perception Locke and, following him, Hume

made a distinction between simple and complex ideas

which allowed them to understand things which were not

directly perceived Complex ideas, such as that of a golden

mountain, can be understood because they can be

analysed into their simple constituents, of which we have

experience However, this technique does not work for

the terms which Bentham wished to analyse, such as

obligation or right So here he was forced into a wholly

new technique, which he called ‘paraphrasis’

This technique anticipates twentieth-century methods

of analysis as does Bentham’s related claim that the

pri-mary unit of significance is a sentence rather than a word

His idea in paraphrasis is not to translate the problematic word into other words Rather, ‘some whole sentence of which it forms a part is translated into another sentence’

So in the analysis of what Bentham called ‘fictional entities’ (such as right, duty, property, obligation, immunity, privilege—the whole language of the law), he uses his technique of paraphrasis to place these terms in sentences for which he then gives substitute sentences not con-taining the offending term For example, sentences about rights are explained by Bentham in terms of sentences about duties A particular right is for him the benefit which

is conferred on someone by the imposition of duties on others With duties we still, of course, have fictional entities But these, in turn, can be placed in sentences which are translated into sentences about the threat of punishment Punishment is, for Bentham, the threat of the imposition

of pain So here, at last, we reach what Bentham calls real entities We reach clear, simple ideas, which can be directly understood by perception As Bentham says in the

Fragment on Government, ‘pain and pleasure at least are

words which a man has no need, we may hope, to go to a Lawyer to know the meaning of ’ With them the law can

be clarified; for lawyers and others The ultimate clarifier

of value, of what the law should be, will also work as a clarifier of what the law actually is

These projects are projects for change: current condi-tions are criticized However, although Bentham’s goals were the same as many of the contemporary movements for change, his foundations were not Bentham was on the side not just of the struggle for reform of the franchise in England but also of the American and French Revolu-tions The central contemporary justification for these revolutions was in terms of natural rights However, Ben-tham was consistently opposed to the use of natural rights and he therefore criticized the rhetorical justification of both of these revolutions

Bentham thinks that a *natural right is a ‘contradiction

in terms’ He thinks that they are ‘nonsense’, fictitious entities However, as has been seen, Bentham produced a new engine of analysis in his technique of paraphrasis pre-cisely to make sense of fictitious entities So it might be thought that he could make sense in the same way of nat-ural rights However, comparing a natnat-ural right with a legal right exposes the difference Both can be analysed in terms of corresponding duties However, as seen, Ben-tham analyses a legal duty in terms of the law (or threat of punishment) which creates it There is no corresponding law, he holds, with respect to supposed natural duties Hence he holds that natural rights are just imaginary rights by contrast with the real rights produced by actually existing systems of law As he puts it, ‘from real law come real rights from imaginary laws come imaginary ones’ The so-called rights of man are in fact merely ‘counterfeit rights’

Bentham’s most famous slogan expressing this view is

*‘nonsense on stilts’ This comes from his critical analysis

of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen

in a work usually known as Anarchical Fallacies (which, in

Bentham, Jeremy 89