The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 14 pdf

c British moral philosophers have also played in influential role in the revival of interest in two central ideas in ethics: *consequentialism and the *virtues.. Perhaps the most striking

reconciled with the causal theory of knowledge (b)

*Vagueness A brief but provocative paper by Gareth Evans

(‘Can There Be Vague Objects?’), which appeared in 1978,

inspired a considerable amount of work on the question

whether vagueness was simply a feature of language or

knowledge or also of the world itself There has been a

flowering of work on traditional ontological issues,

con-cerning *causality, *identity, *modality, *time,

*proper-ties, and *particulars

Ethics Three important developments should be

men-tioned (a) The work of Bernard Williams, Alasdair

Mac-Intyre (based in the USA since 1972), and Derek Parfit has

highlighted the central place of the self, and ideas of the

self, in ethics Parfit in particular has questioned our

ordin-ary view of the self as retaining its numerical identity

through time, and shown how his alternative view breaks

down the boundaries between persons and so undermines

*egoism (b) John Mackie’s influential critique of moral

*objectivism (Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, published

in 1977) has provoked two kinds of critical response One

is a defence of objectivism, or realism, championed by

Jonathan Dancy, John McDowell (based in the USA since

1986), and David McNaughton Although realism has its

American proponents, the British version rejects *ethical

naturalism (the view that moral properties are reducible

to non-moral properties) The other response, offered by

Simon Blackburn is ‘quasi-realism’ or ‘projectivism’,

which takes ethical values to be real, though

mind-dependent, qualities (c) British moral philosophers have

also played in influential role in the revival of interest in

two central ideas in ethics: *consequentialism and the

*virtues Here we should name, on the one hand, R M

Hare (arguably the father of contemporary moral theory

(d 2002) ), and on the other, Elizabeth Anscombe

(d 2001), and Phillipa Foot

Philosophy of science Perhaps the most striking

develop-ment in philosophy of science in recent years has been the

detailed engagement with the philosophical and

meta-physical implications of quantum physics, pioneered by

Michael Redhead and Nancy Cartwright (based in the UK

since 1991), and pursued notably in Oxford, London,

Cambridge, and Leeds

Engagement with continental philosophy *Continental

phil-osophy is, by definition, not British in its origins, aims,

and methods Nevertheless, a significant feature of the

national scene in recent years has been the increasing

interest and specialization in continental philosophy

within British departments Traditionally, analytic

philoso-phy has been hostile to the continental style, culminating

in the publicly voiced objections to the award in 1992 of an

honorary degree to Jacques Derrida by Cambridge

Uni-versity Recent work, however, has attempted something

of a rapprochement.

Philosophers and public debate Although much

philosoph-ical work is conducted within academic institutions,

prominent philosophers have from time to time been

appointed to leading roles on Government committees, especially on ethical matters Examples of this contribu-tion of philosophers to the formulacontribu-tion of policy include Bernard Williams’s chairing of the Committee on Obscen-ity and Film Censorship, Mary Warnock’s chairing of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilization, which produced the much discussed Warnock Report in 1984, and Anthony O’Hear’s work as a government adviser on education A recent high-profile discussion was Onora

O’Neill’s 2002 BBC Reith Lectures, A Question of Trust, on

accountability, deception, and freedom of the press

Political constraints The 1980s was a time of crisis for

phil-osophy in Britain, in economic, rather than intellectual, terms University cut-backs saw the freezing of posts and the closure of some departments The overall situation improved during the 1990s, and with the increasing popu-larity of philosophy as a university subject, some depart-ments have actually expanded However, one significant determinant of the fortunes of individual departments has been the five-yearly national Research Assessment Exer-cise, instituted in 1991, which rates quality of research out-put, with corresponding implications for the research funding allocation to universities Partly, but not wholly,

as a result of this, there has been a significant increase in productivity (as measured by publications), and research activity is now widespread rather than concentrated in a

*Cambridge philosophy; English philosophy; London philosophy; Oxford philosophy; Scottish philosophy; Wittgensteinians

Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom (eds.), New British Philoso-phy: The Interviews (London, 2002).

Margaret Little, ‘Recent Work on Moral Realism II:

Non-Naturalism’, Philosophical Books (1995).

Bryan Magee, Talking Philosophy: Dialogues with Fifteen Leading Philosophers (Oxford, 2001).

Andrew Pyle, Key Philosophers in Conversation: The Cogito Inter-views (London, 1999).

G J Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900 (Oxford, 1969).

Broad, Charles Dunbar(1887–1971) Judicious and witty Cambridge philosopher, author of many thorough works

on science, mind, ethics, and psychical research Broad’s typical method was an elaborately exhaustive classifica-tion of all possible answers to some carefully clarified question, a judicious weighing-up of the pros and cons of each, and a tentative suggestion for the most plausible He believed that in *perception we are presented with ‘sensa’, whose occurrence is the effect of events in the brain in virtue of a peculiar kind of causation, that these sensa are not literally spatio-temporal parts of the perceived objects but provide literally true information about their spatio-temporal character and relations, and that physical objects must also have other characteristics which provide their qualitative filling He developed a notion of absolute becoming to explain the greater reality of past than future and postulated a ψ component which combined with the brain to produce consciousness He judged the

110 British philosophy today

empirical evidence on our survival of *death finely

C D Broad, An Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy

(Cam-bridge, 1933, 1938)

P Schilpp, (ed.), The Philosophy of C D Broad (La Salle,Ill., 1959).

Brouwer, L E J. (1881–1966) Dutch mathematician

known to philosophers as the founder of *intuitionism as

a philosophy of mathematics This owes something to the

philosophy of Kant, but more to the paradoxes and

con-tradictions that beset logic and mathematics in the early

1900s Brouwer thought that these arose because familiar

principles of reasoning were being blindly applied to an

unsuitable subject-matter, i.e to infinite totalities In his

view only a ‘potential’ infinity can be understood, and

consequently a statement about all numbers can be

counted as true only if we have a method of proving it for

any arbitrary number Since there are many statements

about all numbers which we can neither prove nor

dis-prove, Brouwer inferred that the law of excluded middle

*intuitionist logic; constructivism

A Heyting, Intuitionism, 3rd edn (Amsterdam, 1971).

P Mancosu (ed.), From Hilbert to Brouwer: The Debate on the

Foun-dations of Mathematics in the 1920s (Oxford, 1988).

Brownson, Orestes Augustus(1803–76) New England

social critic, political advocate, religious controversialist,

philosopher, and journalist, Brownson was for a time an

effective advocate of *New England Transcendentalism

He was perhaps the most socially astute transcendentalist,

arguing in ‘The Laboring Classes’ (published in his Boston

Quarterly Review in 1840) that the wage system exploited

the many in favour of the few and that reform could result

only from changing the system and not simply from

indi-vidual moral improvement (the standard

transcendental-ist solution to social problems) His most radical reform

proposal was for the abolition of hereditary property: at

death one’s property reverts to the state, which is to

dis-tribute it fairly His conversion in 1844 to Roman

Catholi-cism caused dismay among his former transcendentalist

compatriots; as a Catholic Brownson was as creative,

outspoken, and controversial as he had been as a

Arthur M Schlesinger Jr., Orestes A Brownson: A Pilgrim’s Progress

(Boston, 1939)

Bruno, Giordano(1548–1600) Italian philosopher who

sought to overthrow Aristotelianism and replace it with

his own eclectic and often self-contradictory philosophical

system Combining the astronomy of Copernicus with

the metaphysics of Nicholas of Cusa and the atomism of

Lucretius, he believed in an infinite universe which

con-tained an infinite number of inhabited worlds, moving

within an uncentred space and composed of minimal

par-ticles He rejected *hylomorphism in favour of a *monism

in which the universal, infinite, and eternal substance was

identical with both God and nature Having been excom-municated by the Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist Churches on account of his unconventional religious views and undisciplined behaviour, he was finally burned

at the stake by the Inquisition He died a heretic, but in the nineteenth century he was transformed into a martyr to

*persecution of philosophers

P Michel, The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno (Paris, 1973).

Brunschvicg, Léon(1869–1944) French idealist philoso-pher who provides a sustained neo-Hegelian answer to the Kantian question: How is knowledge possible? Reject-ing the Kantian project of a transcendental deduction of the categories, Brunschvicg construes philosophy as the historical reflection of consciousness on consciousness

This reveals ‘the progress of consciousness’ (le progrès de la conscience) typified by the emergence of the natural

sci-ences, the findings of which, Brunschvicg argues, are con-sistent with his own idealism

Brunschvicg is also known for his scholarly treatments

of Descartes and Pascal and for the extension of his histor-ical idealism to the ethics of conscience s.p

*idealism; Hegelianism

Leon Brunschvicg, La Philosophie de Léon Brunschvicg (Paris, 1949).

—— Le Progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale, 2 vols.

(Paris, 1927)

brute fact.Two related uses of this idea feature in con-temporary analytical philosophy The first and more com-mon one signifies the terminus of a series of explanations which is not itself further explicable Thus, for example, it

is often said that while the behaviour of matter can be explained by reference to laws of nature the existence and character of those laws is itself a ‘brute fact’ The second and more technical use indicates an underlying situation partly constitutive of the truth of a claim The expression was first used in this sense by Anscombe to characterize the status of facts relative to higher-level descriptions A

set of facts S is ‘brute’ relative to a description D when the truth of D is constituted by the holding of those facts in a

certain context and under normal conditions Thus, the

*fact that I inscribed a piece of paper, in a context consti-tuted by banking conventions, is brute relative to the description ‘J.H signed a cheque’, and the fact so described may itself, in a given context, be brute relative to the description ‘J.H ran into debt’ Hence the status of brute and non-brute facts is a relative one j.hal

G E M Anscombe, ‘On Brute Facts’, Analysis (1958).

Buber, Martin(1878–1965) Jewish philosopher born in Vienna and raised in the Ukraine in the home of his grand-father, the Midrash scholar Solomon Buber Martin Buber studied in Vienna with Dilthey and Simmel and became a Zionist leader in the 1890s, advocating cultural and edu-cational activism Attracted to the Hasidism of Nah.man of Bratslav, whose tales he adapted in German, he wrote

Buber, Martin 111

novels of the Hasidic milieu and urged formation of a

Gemeinschaft in Palestine that would include Arabs and

Jews His teaching cut off by Nazi edicts, Buber settled in

Palestine in 1938 and became a prominent advocate of a

binational (Arab–Jewish) state His I and Thou (1923)

grounds ethics and theology in a dialogical encounter: our

fundamental attitudes of turning-toward or leaning-back

demarcate the basic relations of I–It and *I–Thou, which

constitute both self and other in radically different ways,

objectively, in terms of uses, causes, effects, and

chal-lenges to be overcome; or intersubjectively, and

person-ally, that is, morperson-ally, even aesthetically Authenticity,

responsiveness, even genuine presentness (and thus

free-dom) are attained only in the I–Thou relationship The

objectivity of the I–It is fixed in the past *God is the

eter-nal Thou, never transformed into an It by spiritual ennui

or fatigue, but glimpsed through our encounters with

others, with nature and with works of art It is when we

speak to him, not of him, that we encounter the living

God Even those who hate God’s name can do this, when

they address their lives in terms of a subjecthood that

cannot be limited by another Revelation is humanity’s

continuing response to the eternal Thou, epitomized in

P A Schilpp and M Friedman (eds.), The Philosophy of Martin

Buber (La Salle, Ill., 1967).

Buddha, the( fl fifth century bc) The Sanskrit word

‘bud-dha’ refers to any enlightened person, but ‘The Bud‘bud-dha’

refers specifically to Siddha¯rtha Gautama, son of a ruler of

Sa¯kya in what is now Nepal Modern scholarship places

him rather later than the traditional dates of c.560–480.

The Buddha founded a non-theistic religion and

articu-lated the foundations of *Buddhist philosophy—the Four

Noble Truths concerning suffering, its causes and its

ces-sation, the theory of ‘dependent origination’, and the

denial of substantial selfhood

According to tradition, the twenty-nine-year-old

Gau-tama, troubled by the sickness and death he witnessed, left

Sa¯kya in search of an understanding of suffering After

several unsuccessful years of ascetic and spiritual practice,

he found enlightenment, at thirty-five, while meditating

beneath a fig-tree He then delivered the first of many

dis-courses (suttas) that, after centuries of oral transmission,

were recorded in the Pali Canon The Buddha was a man

of great physical presence, compassion, and serenity

This, allied to his dialectical skills, ensured that before his

painful but dignified death he had already gained a large

following of monks and lay people

Unlike the founders of other religions, the Buddha

grounded his teachings on rational reflection, not divine

revelation, and adumbrated a philosophically

sophisti-cated account of reality, mind, and the human condition

His philosophical temper was decidedly *empiricist, for

‘right view’ is vouchsafed by clear-headed experience of

the world and oneself He criticizes Brahmanism for

pos-tulating such transcendent entities as an absolute Self

(a¯tman), and rejects so-called unanswered questions

(e.g ‘Is the world eternal?), not only because they are irrele-vant to obtaining ‘release’ from suffering, but because, enquiring beyond the limits of experience, they are sense-less The truths he himself advances are available to any-one fully ‘mindful’ of the world around him and the workings of his own mind Indeed, mindful experience is essential to proper understanding of these truths One who grasps that there is only ‘not-self’, for example, does not simply assent to the Buddha’s propositions, but experi-ences the world and himself in a new key The Buddha’s moral philosophy is equally empiricist in character, experi-entially based reflections on the integral role of such virtues as compassion and equanimity in a life liberating itself from the causes of suffering d.e.c

M Carrithers, The Buddha (Oxford, 1983).

S Hamilton, Early Buddhism: A New Approach (Richmond, Surrey,

2000)

Buddhism:see Buddhist philosophy.

Buddhist philosophy. Ethical, metaphysical, and epi-stemological views held by an Indian prince turned ascetic, Siddha¯rtha Gautama (said to have been born 563 bc), and

by subsequent schools of thought claiming allegiance to him Siddha¯rtha was called ‘Buddha’, which means ‘the awakened one’

Buddha’s teachings Facing the fragility of life, and the facts

of disease, decay, and death, young Siddha¯rtha left his family in search of peace and enlightenment, which came not through extreme austerity or philosophical wrangling but through meditating along ‘the middle way’ On finally becoming ‘awakened’ he preached Four Noble Truths:

1 Life is suffering

2 Suffering involves a chain of causes

3 Suffering can cease

4 There is a path to such cessation

The first truth, equating existence with suffering, was buttressed by a reductionist metaphysics of universal impermanence and soullessness We suffer because we expect a substantial core in things, when in fact there is none either inside or outside us Apparent *substances are reducible to groups of ephemeral parts, *persons to streams of causally interdependent collections of five

psy-chophysical aggregates, an ‘essence’ like catness to mere

exclusion from the mixed set of non-feline individuals Since selves and things are so unstable and essenceless, our inborn wish to retain our identity and to cling to an essence of what we desire leads to frustration The truth of universal pain ultimately becomes an evaluative rather

than descriptive judgement Buddha urges that life should

be looked upon as agony through and through

The second truth concerning the cause of suffering was fleshed out as the twelve-link causal chain of dependent aris-ing: ignorance →karma-propensities→embryonic sen-tience → body and psychoses → five senses plus an introspective faculty →sense–object contact →experience

→thirst→clinging→rebirth→decay→death

112 Buber, Martin

This, called the ‘Wheel of Becoming’, obviously

con-nects with the *karma-based theory of metempsychosis

But if there is no self, what is reborn? In answer, Buddha

draws a Ryle-like analogy between ‘The individual gets

reborn’ and ‘The news travels’ It is ignorance to think of

the news as an entity doing the travelling To conceive a

continuing agent is equally mistaken, and propels us

towards egoistic actions—we find ourselves enmeshed in

the causal chain of becoming The so-called person is in fact

just a bundle of five psychophysical factors These five

aggregates (physical forms, sensations, feelings,

judge-ments, and latent dispositions) constituting the individual

at the dying moment cause another, subtler, fivefold

replica, which causes yet another—and so on until the new

physical form of a foetus is produced, to which all the

crav-ings, traces, and the illusory sense of identity of the dying

bundle have been bequeathed ‘The soul’ is the name of a

causally bound bundle which spans countless deaths and

births This reductionist set-and-series concept of a person,

called the doctrine of anatta¯ in Pali, has recently received

some publicity among English-speaking philosophers

through the work of Derek Parfit

The third noble truth sets up *nirvana as the final

liber-ation from the pain of repeated embodiment, which can

only happen if the ignorance of regarding oneself as a

sub-stantial permanent ego is dispelled Ultimate and

unend-ing calm is attained when all cravunend-ings—even the cravunend-ing

for extinction—cease without leaving behind any seed

Since such a state is attainable by every thinking being,

irrespective of class, gender, caste, or even species,

Bud-dhism is not pessimistic or discriminatory

Finally, the fourth noble truth of the way to the

summum bonum of nirvana gives the ethics This is the

eight-fold path: ethically correct views, right resolutions, right

speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, proper

mindfulness, and regular practice of concentration These

intellectual, social, and meditational virtues promote the

overarching moral qualities of clarity, desirelessness,

uni-versal friendliness, and compassion Suffering ceases

through selflessness, metaphysical and moral Using a

uni-versalizability criterion the Buddha preached: ‘All men

tremble at punishment, all men fear death Likening others

to oneself, one should neither slay nor cause to slay.’

The Subsequent Schools Although all Buddhists owed

alle-giance to the three scriptural ‘baskets’ into which the

doc-trines, codes of conduct, and philosophical utterances of

Buddha were collected, there arose a major theoretical rift

between the so-called ‘Lesser Vehicle’ (Hı¯naya¯na) and

‘Greater Vehicle’ (Maha¯ya¯na) within 200 years of the

Mas-ter’s death The former faction now survives in Sri Lanka

and Burma, and the latter in Tibet, China, Korea, and

Japan The latter faction of Buddhism may have been

called ‘greater’ because in it the aim of life is not only to end

one’s own suffering but to strive, even after one’s own

personal nirvana, for the enlightenment and happiness of

others Hence the ideal of an altruistic enlightened man

who caringly resolves ‘May the fruits of my austerities and

meditations alleviate the sufferings of all sentient creatures, even of women giving birth!’ This is supra-moral kindness

The Lesser Vehicle The Lesser Vehicle itself branched into

two schools, the first being the realist Vaibha¯s.ika Postu-lating some seventy-two types of composite elements and even a few eternal entities like space and the state of peren-nial painlessness, this school earned the title ‘the every-thing-exists school’ Some members offered detailed accounts of how atoms combine to form directly perceiv-able matter Acute in-house debates regarding the reality

of the past and the future led to observations like this:

‘Past’, ‘present’, ‘future’ are equally objective descriptions

of the same bit of reality, just as the same woman is cor-rectly described as ‘mother’, ‘wife’, and ‘daughter’ The second school of the Lesser Vehicle, representa-tionalist–realist Sautra¯ntika, criticized the first for eternal-ist heresies and gave the following sorts of argument for

strict impermanence: If A endures for more than a moment, say over t1, t2, t3, then, given the Buddhist

defin-ition of reality, it can be real only by being causally product-ive at t1, t2, and t3 Now, either A produces some effect at each moment or it lies capable but fallow at t1and t2and

actually fructifies at t3, when operating auxiliary

condi-tions join A If it produces effects at each moment, then it

must have three different effects because the same effect

cannot be produced thrice Accordingly A disintegrates

into three momentary realities, corresponding to three

distinct causal capacities If it remains fallow at t1and t2

waiting for some auxiliary conditions, as the seed in the granary waits for soil and rain, it is only the terminal entity

A-at-t3which qualifies as real, the previous temporal parts being non-entities, or distinct entities, one generating the other This is the heart of the famous doctrine of momentariness

Given such strict momentariness, the really real is accessible only to pure sensation, which grasps these instantaneous propertyless particulars Sautra¯ntika episte-mology is thus at best a critical realism about tables and chairs where the macroscopic world is a construction of inference Any verbalizable perception invoking classifica-tory concepts is analysed as inference and imagination Later Sautra¯ntika Buddhists like Jña¯nas´rı¯ attack all word-generated awareness as fiction-loaded Words refer

to objects through modes of presentations which are gen-eralities—they never capture particular objects in their vivid singularity This goes by the name of the exclusion theory of meaning, which is at the heart of Buddhist nominalism Even an expression like ‘that cow’ serves only to distinguish the referent from dogs, horses, asses, and other cows further away Apart from this network

of mind-made distinctions, there is no natural kind called

‘the cow’

The Greater Vehicle This nominalistic representationalism

of Sautra¯ntika inevitably led to a Berkeleian idealism of the first school of the Greater Vehicle Yoga¯ca¯ra, also named

‘the mind-only school’ seeks to refute atomists and critical realists by four major arguments

Buddhist philosophy 113

1 Many intricate considerations are put forward against

the existence of bodies in space If, as the realistic

Vaibha¯s.ika school maintained, six atoms join the seventh

from six sides, either the central atom falls into six parts,

which goes against its indivisibility, or the contacts all

happen at one point, which fails to explain any increase of

size So the very idea of extension is incoherent

2 No external object—macroscopic or atomic—has

both the causal and phenomenological features of a real

object of awareness That which both causes and bears the

manifest form of a piece of awareness can count as its real

object If I see glistening water but my seeing is caused by

hot air refracting sunlight, I call that a mirage But, upon the

critical realist theory, the actual cause and the

phenomeno-logical content of perception fall apart Awareness is caused

by imperceptible atoms while it assumes the felt form of

chairs and cherry blossoms

3 Thus, as awarenesses, wakeful and veridical ones are

indistinguishable from dream and erroneous ones, and

equally devoid of any extra-mental object

4 Finally, if x and y are not the same they could be

iso-lated from each other, but blue can never be isoiso-lated from

awareness of blue; hence they must be the same

These idealistic arguments offered by Vasubandhu

(fifth century ad) were vigorously attacked by realists of the

Jaina, Mı¯ma¯msa¯, and Nya¯ya schools Even S´an.kara, himself

an absolute idealist, scoffed at the mind-only Buddhist: ‘If

externality is such an impossibility, how come things even

appear to be external? No one is even mistaken for a barren

woman’s son!’ Anticipating G E Moore, philosophers of

the Nya¯ya school appealed to *common sense, and isolated

formless awareness as the common element in awareness

of blue and awareness of yellow, thereby questioning the

inseparability of objects and perception Jaina opponents of

Yoga¯ca¯ra claimed that perception itself points to the

act–object distinction, but Yoga¯ca¯ra stuck to treating the

‘of ’ of intentionality after the fashion of ‘City of Rome’, as

if the distinction was verbal and spurious

The last and currently most influential school of the

Greater Vehicle—thanks to the present Dalai Lama—is

Voidism or Ma¯dhyamika, which was fully developed by

*Na¯ga¯rjuna with the help of such sceptical arguments as

the following The reliable means of knowledge are

estab-lished by appeal to the reality of the objects they make us

know; but the reality of the objects, in turn, is established

upon the authority of the means of knowledge Since the

criterion of knowledgehood itself is so hopelessly circular,

how can anything be known to have this or that

deter-minate nature? Excelling in negative dialectics,

anti-realism reaches its mystical climax in Voidism This

mysticism, of course, has nothing to do with faith in God

In chapter 10 of his Twelve-Gate Treatise Na¯ga¯rjuna argued,

God could not be our father because children should have some

resemblance with their father, but in our suffering we are most

ungodly Being self-existent, God should also have no needs, yet

obviously he needed to create, otherwise he would be whimsical

like an infant As omnipotent, God should not have any obstacles

to his desire, so what explains the gradual unfolding of creation

instead of creation of everything all at once? Finally, if God is the maker there should be no evil or ugliness in things, but obviously there is

Suffering, causation, and temporal succession are all shown to be uncharacterizable in any determinate man-ner, because all characterizations are equally empty It is this insistence on the emptiness of all things which makes Na¯ga¯rjuna a ‘Voidist’ Since all things are empty, so is the doctrine of emptiness Far from being self-refuting, such

absolute epoche¯ is said to be irrefutable ‘If I had a view I

could have had a flaw, but, emptied of all views, I am flaw-less.’ So says the Voidist, enjoying tranquillity a.c

*Indian philosophy; Hindu philosophy

M Carrithers, The Buddha: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford,

2001)

A K Chatterjee, The Yogacara Idealism (Benares, 1976).

E Conze, Buddhist Thought in India (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1970).

S Mookherjee, The Buddhist Philosophy of Universal Flux (Delhi,

1980)

T Stcherbatsky, Buddhist Logic, 2 vols (Paris, 1958).

Bultmann, Rudolf(1884–1976) German theologian who gives a Heideggerian interpretation of the New Testament which is both anti-metaphysical and existentialist Bult-mann argues that it is the awareness of death as an imme-diate possibility which produces the need for Christianity, and claims that a life without Christ is inauthentic but a life lived in Christ is authentic His ‘demythologizing’ of the New Testament construes its historical and theological doctrines as descriptions of the human condition in so far

as this is a condition of need for God Bultmann’s readings are controversial because they might be logically

*existentialism; authenticity

Rudolf Bultmann, Theologie des Neuen Testaments (Tübingen, 1948–53); tr as Theology of the New Testament, 2 vols (New

York, 1952)

Ronald W Hepburn, ‘Demythologizing and the Problem of

Validity’, in A G N Flew and A MacIntyre (eds.), New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London, 1955).

bundle theory of the self.Empiricist theory of *personal identity particularly associated with David Hume Hume’s view—that we are never aware of our *self as a substance, but only as a ‘bundle or collection of different perceptions’—has been interpreted as a sceptical denial of personal identity More plausibly, Hume can be taken to

be meaning that the peculiarly complex unity or identity

of the self should be interpreted in terms of constantly changing causal relations, more like the identity of a com-plex play than a simple material object A Humean theory

of the self was developed by William James r.s.d

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature,i iv 6

William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York, 1890).

Burali-Forti’s paradox,due to Cesare Burali-Forti, arises

from the assumption that there is a series S1consisting of all ordinal numbers and that this series is well-ordered

114 Buddhist philosophy

From this it follows that S1has an ordinal number X From

this it follows that there is a series S2of ordinals up to and

including X which has the ordinal number X+ 1 This

con-tradicts the assumption that S1has all the ordinal

num-bers This contradiction about ordinals is not usually

taken up in popular discussions because the notion of a

transfinite ordinal is more difficult to explain than that of a

trans-finite cardinal In this sense all transfinite ordinals

*number

Cesare Burali-Forti, ‘Una questione sui numeri transfiniti’,

Rendi-conti di Palermo (1897); Eng tr in J van Heijenoort (ed.), Source

Book in Mathematical Logic 1879–1931 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).

Burckhardt, Jakob Christoph(1818–97) A historian who

lived for most of his life in his native Basle Although a

pupil of Ranke, he was less concerned to discover

object-ive facts than to explore European *‘culture’ (one of the

three great ‘forces’, along with religion and the state, that

govern history), often by way of an anecdote that enabled

him to ‘discern and feel the general in the particular’ His

influential works include The Age of Constantine the Great

(1852; tr London, 1949) and The Culture of the Renaissance

in Italy (1860; tr London, 1878) His main philosophical

work, consisting of lectures (which Nietzsche attended) at

Basle between 1868 and 1871, was published as Reflections

on History (1906; tr London, 1943) Like Schopenhauer

(whom, to Nietzsche, he called ‘our philosopher’), he

despised Hegel’s rationalist and teleological view of

his-tory; denied that man makes significant progress, and thus

preferred to focus on what is ‘recurrent, constant and

typ-ical’; and regarded democracy and industrialization as

threats to liberty and culture m.j.i

K Löwith, Jakob Burckhardt: Der Mensch inmitten der Geschichte

(Lucerne, 1936)

Burge, Tyler(1946– ) American philosopher based at the

University of California, Los Angeles Burge has worked

largely in the philosophies of mind, language, and logic

His earlier work on singular terms and demonstratives

was within the context of Davidson’s theory of meaning

He is also known for a series of papers, beginning in 1979,

in which he argues for *anti-individualism: the thesis that

the contents of thinkers’ intentional states cannot be fixed

by facts about those thinkers taken in isolation from the

rest of their community Burge argues for this through an

ingenious variation on Putnam’s Twin Earth thought

experiment (*arthritis in the thigh) Burge claims that only

by appreciating the social determination of the contents of

thinkers’ thoughts can we account for the irreducibly

nor-mative character of intentional mental states t.c

*externalism

Tyler Burge, ‘Individualism and the Mental’, Midwest Studies in

Philosophy, iv (1979).

Buridan, John (c.1295/1300–c.1360) Student, and then

teacher, at Paris, he was twice rector of the university, in

1328 and 1340 Generally classified as a nominalist, he was one of the great logicians of the Middle Ages, but also a philosopher and theologian He wrote commentaries on a number of works by Aristotle, his Commentary on the

Physics of Aristotle being particularly well known for its

discussion of impetus, in which Buridan attempts to explain how it happens that when a projectile leaves the projector (for example, when a stone leaves the thrower’s hand) it does not promptly fall to earth as a heavy object surely would but instead continues upward Buridan solves the problem by arguing that the projector imparts

an impulse, or impetus, to the projectile, and that it is the impetus that maintains the projectile in motion until countervailing forces, in particular air resistance and the projectile’s weight, prevail and the body finally falls to earth In the course of his discussion Buridan develops the concept of inertia at least in respect of celestial bodies and in so doing makes a clean break with Aristotelian

*ass, Buridan’s; Aristotelianism

E A Moody, ‘Jean Buridan’, in Studies in Medieval Philosophy, Sci-ence and Logic: Collected Papers 1933–1969 (Berkeley, Calif.,

1975)

Burke, Edmund (1729–97) Irish-born political writer noted for literary style, and English MP believed to be an important source of *conservatism

In describing the work of Burke it is accurate to call him

a ‘political writer’ rather than a political theorist or philosopher He was suspicious of the abstract and his writings predominantly exemplify rhetoric at the expense

of reasoned argument He was a master of prose style, although he was never noted for skill in oratory, and some

of his best speeches were said to have emptied the House

of Commons Burke is not and would not have wanted to

be considered a great political philosopher, but he satisfies one criterion of greatness—his thought appeals to succes-sive generations of political thinkers

For one who was later to dismiss abstract philosophiz-ing with some contempt Burke rather oddly began his lit-erary career with two successful works in that genre The

first was A Vindication of Natural Society (1756; 2nd edn.

1757), in which he attacked social philosophy, especially that of Rousseau In 1757 he published a second

philo-sophical essay which, like the first, was very successful—A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful As a result of his success he was taken up by

the literary and artistic circles of London, and was encour-aged by his publisher to try his hand at history His histor-ical work was not published in his lifetime Thereafter began his political life, in which he was to continue until his death in 1797

In his political life he devoted himself (as he says) to five

‘great, just and honourable causes’: the emancipation of the House of Commons from the control of George III and the ‘King’s friends’; the emancipation of the American colonies; the emancipation of Ireland; the emancipation

Burke, Edmund 115

of India from the misgovernment of the East India

Com-pany; and opposition to the atheistical Jacobinism shown

in the French Revolution Successive generations have

reacted in different ways to Burke’s position on all these

questions, if indeed he has a consistent position For

example, his stand against the French Revolution was

attacked by the early Utilitarians such as Paine, Bentham,

and James Mill, on the ground that he had betrayed his

ear-lier championship of political *liberty He himself

regarded his defence of the Indian people against the East

India Company as his greatest achievement, yet it has

been argued that he was lacking in historical knowledge of

India and that he did not really understand the difficulties

facing Warren Hastings in dealing with a totally different

social order His greatest contribution to political thought

is summed up by Wordsworth in The Prelude

Words-worth says of Burke that he ‘declares the vital power of

social ties Endeared by custom’ In other words, Burke

thought of all political power as a trust, and in the case of

Britain politicians were entrusted with the preservation of

a traditional hierarchical social and political order

Burke’s belief that society depends on what he called

‘prejudice’, that is, on instinctive feelings of love and

loy-alty, plus his rejection of the central place which

revolu-tionary thinkers had given to reason, led to his critique of

natural law and natural rights Basically he seems to be

saying that communities are held together not by

self-interest but by the feeling that we are members one of

another; communal feeling is everything and reason is

insignificant Hence, he rejected the appeal made by the

revolutionaries to abstract individual rights For Burke the

important contrast is not between repressive

govern-ments and the abstract rights of the rational individual, but

between the beautiful order of society bonded by loyalties

and ‘prejudice’, and ‘a disbanded race of deserters and

vagabonds’ In rejecting natural law he shared the

conser-vatism of Hume, but his reverential attitude to the state is

much more like Rousseau than Hume r.s.d

*sublime; revolution

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed.

Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth, 1968)

—— Pre-Revolutionary Writings, ed I Harris (Cambridge, 1993).

C B Macpherson, Burke (Oxford, 1980).

Burnyeat, Myles Frederic(1939– ) Laurence Professor

of Ancient Philosophy, University of Cambridge in the

1980s and 1990s, thereafter Fellow of All Souls College,

Oxford Noted chiefly but not solely for his work on the

history of epistemology, he has produced important

stud-ies of Plato, and has played a significant role in the

redirec-tion of scholarly attenredirec-tion to *Hellenistic philosophy, in

particular to the ideas of the *Sceptics n.c.d

Myles Burnyeat, The Theaetetus of Plato (Indianapolis, 1990).

—— (ed.), The Skeptical Tradition (Berkeley, Calif., 1983).

—— (co-ed.), Doubt and Dogmatism: Studies in Hellenistic

Epistemol-ogy (Oxford, 1980).

—— (co-ed.), Science and Speculation: Studies in Hellenistic Theory

and Practice (Cambridge, 1982).

business ethics. One of the areas of *applied ethics Although the application of morality to business is as old

as business and morality themselves, the rise of business ethics as an identifiable subject of study took place in the 1970s in the United States, and since the late 1980s in Europe, Australia, and a number of countries in Asia, Africa, and South America

Business ethics as an academic area is defined by the interaction of business and ethics, and the set of related problems thus generated At its broadest, it studies the moral justification of economic systems, whether national or international Within a given system it studies the moral justification of the system’s structures and practices Since corporations are a dominant feature of the free-enterprise system, a good deal of work has focused on the structures, governance, responsibilities, and activities

of corporations Within the corporation business ethics deals with the moral responsibilities and rights of indi-vidual managers and employees—the more traditional focus of previous work on ethics in business

Those who work in business ethics tend to engage in four types of activity The first and most common is the development and discussion of case-studies that raise some moral issue in business These are used to sensitize students, those in business, and the general public to the need for ethical considerations in business Although at first these cases tended to illustrate unethical behaviour

on the part of large corporations, in recent years there has also been a growing literature on positive cases presenting exemplary corporate or individual activity Cases-studies

in turn have led to the investigation of the morality of par-ticular practices, to the responsibility of corporations with respect to consumers and the public, product safety, the rights of workers, environmental degradation, and similar issues A third kind of research considers how corpor-ations might be structured so as to reinforce ethical behav-iour and discourage unethical behavbehav-iour on the part of both workers and managers A fourth kind of activity can

be called meta-ethical This looks at the appropriateness of applying moral language to entities other than human beings, e.g to corporations, corporate structures, economic systems There has been lively discussion of whether corpor-ations can rightly be said to have moral *obligcorpor-ations or responsibilities Terms such as *‘responsibility’, *‘con-science’, *‘rights’, *‘virtue’, mean something diferent when applied to corporations than when applied to human indi-viduals, as do notions of praise and blame, reward and pun-ishment

The importance of international business has led to dis-cussions of international business ethics and to a reconsid-eration of moral and cultural relativism, which take on special significance when considering doing business in societies with corrupt governments and in the absence of many traditional restraints Work in international busi-ness ethics has called into question whether Western-type approaches to ethical theory actually enjoy the universal-ity which they claim or to which they aspire The primary focus of international business ethics has been on the

116 Burke, Edmund

actions of multinational corporations from developed

countries operating in less developed countries Issues

include bribery, the use of child labour, the degradation of

the environment, the exploitation of workers, and the

increasing gap between rich and poor countries Global

issues involve the justice or fairness of policies of global

institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the

World Bank, the depletion of the ozone layer, and the

appropriate role of corporations and nations in halting or

reversing the process, and the depletion of non-renewable

natural resources The growth of the Internet as a medium

of commerce that easily crosses national boundaries has

also generated new concerns about the ethical dimensions

of privacy violations by businesses, control of commercial

pornography, and protection of intellectual property

avail-able in digitalized form

Business ethics has developed into a significant area of

research and teaching with its own texts, journals, and

professional societies But it has gone beyond the

aca-demic setting in which it developed It has become

some-thing of a movement, in which corporations have adopted

codes of conduct or statements of values and beliefs, have

introduced the position of corporate-ethics officer,

insti-tuted in-house training programmes in ethics, established

ethics hotlines, and appointed ethical ombudsmen The

corporate movement is mixed: sometimes salutary,

pro-viding positive promotion and reinforcement of ethical

norms; sometimes self-serving, emphasizing ethics for

employees towards the corporation, but exempting the

corporation itself (and its top officers) from ethical

assess-ment; and sometimes negative, serving simply as

‘win-dow-dressing’ to mask amoral corporate activity The

movement can be distinguished from the academic area

with which it is related, but which continues to have a

crit-ical (although not necessarily antagonistic) component

with respect to business, and which interacts with

stand-ard normative and meta-ethical theory r.de g

*capitalism; markets and the public good; professional

ethics

Tom L Beauchamp and Norman E Bowie (eds.), Ethical Theory

and Business, 6th edn (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2001).

Richard T De George, Business Ethics, 5th edn (Upper Saddle

River, NJ, 1999)

—— Business Ethics Quarterly, 10, no 1 (2000).

G Enderle (ed.), International Business Ethics: Challenges and

Approaches (Notre Dame, Ind., 1999).

Butler, Joseph(1692–1752) Anglican divine, Bishop of

Durham His Fifteen Sermons (1726), perhaps the finest

eth-ical work in English, brilliantly attacks psychologeth-ical and

ethical *hedonism and provides a via media between a

moral-sense approach to ethics and a rationalist one Since

pleasure is the satisfaction of an impulse, the desire to

maximize one’s own (self-love) requires impulses with

other objects, e.g particular passions (like hunger) and

*benevolence Self-love is not peculiarly ‘natural’ Life is

‘natural’ when the influence of each motive accords with

its intrinsic authority Conscience should adjudicate

between the two high-level principles of self-love and benevolence and these should control the particular

pas-sions Butler’s book The Analogy of Religion (1736) defends

Christianity against *deism The analogy is between the Bible and nature, which bear the marks of the same author

In a famous appendix Butler defends the absoluteness of

*personal identity against Locke’s empiricist treatment

t.l.s.s

Austin Duncan-Jones, Butler’s Moral Philosophy (Harmondsworth,

1952)

Terence Penelhum, Butler (London, 1985).

Butler, Samuel(1835–1902) Satirist, novelist,

metaphys-ical biologist, anti-Christian Erewhon (1872), and Erewhon Revisited (1901), satirize Victorian values In Erewhon

(‘nowhere’ backwards—almost) there are two currencies, one issued by commercial banks and used for all practical purposes (the decencies of ordinary and business life) and another issued with great solemnity in magnificent build-ings, but commercially useless (Christianity) Erewhonian thought also includes elements of his own striking specu-lations, for example on machines as extensions of the human organism which may threaten us by a rival evolu-tion of their own and on the invalidity of a distincevolu-tion between an individual and his influence (so that there is a genuine afterlife as long as this continues) In several anti-Darwinian works Butler propounds his Lamarckian the-ory of creative *evolution by inherited memthe-ory, as he

does also in his novel of generational change The Way of All Flesh (1903) His satirical (and sometimes perversely per-suasive) defence of the Resurrection in The Fair Haven

(1873) was quoted in pulpits until its disguised authorship

Peter Raby, Samuel Butler: A Biography (London, 1991).

Byzantine philosophy. ‘Byzantine philosophy’ would seem to refer, straightforwardly, to philosophy written in the Byzantine Empire In fact the reference is anything but straightforward There is, for example, no clear chrono-logical line separating late ancient from Byzantine phil-osophy There is, again, no responsible way to extricate Byzantine philosophy from Byzantine theology or Byzan-tine literature The best that can be done is to depict some features in authors who have as good a claim as any to the label ‘Byzantine’

The most obvious feature is a continuity of learning Byzantine writers who disagreed about much else under-stood themselves to share at least two kinds of tradition They shared a tradition of Greek literacy, including a legacy of Greek philosophical texts considerably larger than that available in Latin translation before the Renais-sance Byzantine writers shared next a set of theological authorities These authorities included the seven ecu-menical councils of the Church (325–787), but also Chris-tian writers who combined fervent piety with formidable learning in Greek letters, including philosophy and nat-ural science Chief among these were Gregory Nazianzen

Byzantine philosophy 117

(323–89), Basil of Caesarea (c.330–79) and his brother

Gregory of Nyssa (c.335–95), and John Chrysostom

(347–407) Later Byzantine writers looked back to these

four, and especially to Basil and John, as the ‘fathers’ of

right belief and holy practice

Byzantine writers were further able to appropriate the

last works of non-Christian Greek philosophy The

intri-cate *Neoplatonism of Proclus (c.410–85) was taken over

by a Syrian who took as pseudonym ‘Dionysius the

Areopagite’ The writings of this pseudo-Dionysius (active

c.500) present a thoroughly Christian adaptation of

Procline philosophy to questions about the intelligibility

and accessibility of God In the same years, Proclus’ pagan

successors in Athens continued his reinvigoration of the

old practices of philosophical commentary Among their

most remarkable expositions were the extensive

com-mentaries on Aristotle by Simplicius The fact of expert

Aristotelian commentaries by Neoplatonists illustrated

another kind of adaptation, as it seemed to fulfil the ancient

wish for a reconciliation of Plato and Aristotle

The shared sources, Christian and pagan, and the

models of adaptation inspired various Byzantine works in

or about what seems to us philosophy John Damascene

(died c.751) composed a Fount of Knowing that contains: (1)

a dictionary of technical terms ranging from Aristotelian

logic to Trinitarian theology, (2) a critical history and

doc-trinal analysis of Christian heresies, and (3) a compendium

of orthodox theology comprising, among much else,

elementary lessons in Aristotelian and Galenic natural

philosophy Michael Psellos (1018–c.1096) wrote a

Teach-ing of All Sorts that displays an unusual knowledge of pagan

Neoplatonism and even an interest in philosophical

astrology and magic By contrast, the Philosophy of George

Pachymeres (1242–1307) is a sequential paraphrase of the

principal works of Aristotle, from the Categories to the Nicomachean Ethics.

Of course, the simultaneous inheritance of pagan and Christian sources brought deep tensions Even those friendliest to ancient philosophy, such as Psellos, were careful to note its discrepancies with Christianity Other Byzantine authors viewed these discrepancies as evidence for the bankruptcy of pagan learning So, for example, the

150 Chapters of Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) rejects the

errors of prideful reason, and especially the errors of Plato and Aristotle, in favour of Christian revelation grasped by the prayer of the heart

No one can know how these controversies would have developed if Byzantine life had not been disrupted by the fall of Constantinople in 1453 What can be known is the influence of visiting or exiled Byzantine scholars on West-ern Europe George Gemistos Plethon (1355/60–1452), for example, electrified Florentine humanists with his teaching of Plato John Bessarion (1403–72), who died a Roman cardinal, not only defended Plato against the attacks of Aristotelians, he left his valuable Greek library

to the Venetians Much of *Renaissance philosophy is the afterlife of Byzantine philosophy m.d.j

Milton V Anastos, The Mind of Byzantium (New York, 1966).

K Ierodiakonou (ed.), Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources

(Oxford, 2002)

G Podskalsky, Theologie und Philosophie in Byzanz (Munich,

1977)

Basile Tatakis, La Philosophie byzantine (Paris, 1949; English

trans-lation, Indianapolis, 2004)

118 Byzantine philosophy

cabbala:see Kabbalah.

Cajetan, Cardinal Thomas de Vio(1468–1534) General of

the Dominicans and, as Cardinal-legate to the Empire in

1518–19, involved in unsuccessful dialogue with Luther,

Cajetan was an influential commentator on Aristotle and

Aquinas More pessimistic of the powers of human reason

than previous Thomists, Cajetan denied in particular that

the immortality of the soul could be established

independ-ently of revelation Cajetan also developed the Thomist

theory of analogy, and so of how terms such as ‘good’

could be applied without equivocation both to *God and

to finite creatures Cajetan argued that when we describe

both God and finite creatures as good, we employ an

ana-logy of proportionality: the same quality is attributed to

God as is attributed to creatures—but proportionately to

*Thomism

M McCandles, ‘Univocalism in Cajetan’s Doctrine of Analogy’,

New Scholasticism (1968).

calculus.A calculus is a formal language and rules for

manipulating expressions of the language For example,

by applying *algorithms to arabic numerals one can

deter-mine the values of arithmetical functions A logical

calcu-lus is used to construct valid *arguments It can be

described as the syntax of a logic where syntax has to do

only with the shapes and structure of expressions, not

their meanings

The syntax of a logic has two parts: the grammar and

the deductive system The grammar is a list of symbols or

rules for constructing symbols of the logical language, and

a specification of which finite strings of symbols are to

count as sentences or well-formed formulae The

deduct-ive system of a logic consists of axioms and rules of

infer-ence which are used to construct proofs of sentinfer-ences of

the logical language Axioms can be written at any line of

a proof and do not rest on any premisses; rules of inference

permit the writing of a sentence at a line of a proof given

that appropriate conditions are met A deductive system

must have at least one rule of inference but need not have

any axioms; a deductive system is an axiomatic system if it

contains axioms, a natural deduction system if it does not

A proof of a sentence A from a set of premisses Γis a finite, non-empty sequence of sentences such that the last

mem-ber of the sequence is A and each memmem-ber of the sequence

is either a member ofΓor an axiom or follows according

to a rule of inference from one or more sentences that pre-cede it One can mechanically determine whether any given finite sequence of sentences is a proof

Although logical calculuses can be objects of study in their own right, it is their application to the construction and criticism of arguments that gives calculuses their ori-ginal point An argument in English is valid just in case it is not possible for all the premisses to be true and the con-clusion false Valid arguments can be grouped according

to their shapes or form For example, it is easy to see that the following arguments share their form, despite their differ-ent contdiffer-ent or subject-matter If Wales wins, then England loses; Wales wins; therefore, England loses If John is tall, then John is heavy; John is tall; therefore, John is heavy Logical calculuses differ according as they concentrate on different kinds of valid argument forms For example, the

*propositional calculus is concerned with arguments, such as the pair just given, which depend for their validity

on the meanings of the truth-functional connectives, here the meaning of ‘if then’

Arguments in English are often hard to make out Bet-ter to translate English arguments into a logical calculus which is brief and unambiguous and then determine whether the translation is a *proof or can be made into a proof by inserting extra steps For example, we can trans-late the simple argument that establishes the defeat of

England into the propositional calculus: let ‘P’ represent

‘Wales wins’, ‘Q’ represent ‘England loses’, and ‘P→Q’

represent ‘If Wales wins, then England loses’ Then we can make a proof of the translated argument by

employ-ing the rule of inference known as modus ponendo ponens,

which permits the move from a pair of sentences of the

form A and A→B to the sentence of the form B and, hence, justifies the move from ‘P’ and ‘P→Q’ to ‘Q’ in our

translated argument

To guarantee that the existence of a proof entails that the original English argument is valid the rules of infer-ence must be truth-preserving A semantics for the calcu-lus explicates, using the notion of an interpretation, the idea of a possible situation in which sentences are true or

C