The first sig-nificant teachers of philosophy at Cambridge were the mid-seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists, espe-cially Cudworth and Henry More.. But since about 1960 Cambridge philo
Trang 1false An argument of the calculus is defined to be valid
just in case in any interpretation in which all the premisses
are true, the conclusion is also true Then the minimum
requirement for the rules of inference is that they be
sound: if there is a proof of A from a set Γ, then the
argu-ment with the members ofΓas premisses and A as
A Church, Introduction to Mathematical Logic (Princeton, NJ,
1956), i introduction, sect 7
W Kneale and M Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford, 1962),
ch 9
E J Lemmon, Beginning Logic (London, 1965).
calculus, predicate:see predicate calculus.
calculus, propositional:see propositional calculus.
Calvin, John (Jean) (1509–64) French theologian
Reformer active in Geneva A principal founder of
Protest-antism, his main theological doctrine is absolute
predestin-ation, which entails the inevitability of the eternal
salvation of the elect and the eternal damnation of the
unchosen, irrespective of perceived desert but according
to the will of God The inamissibility of *grace is a
logical consequence of absolute predestination (because F is
inamissible if and only if F is not liable to be lost) Calvin’s
theology entails the Lutheran doctrines that Scripture is
the only guide to faith, there is human free will before but
not after the Fall of Adam, and the distinguishing of the
righteous from the sinful is by faith alone (sola fide), not
works Calvinism is characterized by a strong emphasis on
the omnipotence of God and human sin, rather than
God’s benevolence and human freedom *Barth’s
argu-ments against the possibility of *natural theology and
insistence on the unique importance of God’s
self-revelation in Christ lend support to Calvinism s.p
*Calvinism
John Calvin, The Institutes of Christian Religion (Grand Rapids,
Mich., 1987)
Paul Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas (Oxford, 2004).
Alister E McGrath (ed.), The Christian Theology Reader (Oxford,
2002), pp 425–6
Calvinism.Based primarily upon the teachings of John
Calvin (1509–64), Calvinism has a doctrinal side and a
cul-tural side The former stresses the sovereignty of God, the
goodness of his creation, the sinfulness of human
crea-tures, the sole authority of Scripture, and (though not as
centrally as commonly believed) the predestination of his
creatures to eternal life made possible by Christ’s
redemp-tive work The latter (built on the theme of the goodness
of creation) stresses an approach to culture which
empha-sizes involvement, hard work, and material success rather
than withdrawal and other-worldly flight Often
charac-terized as deterministic, the teachings of Calvinism are
perfectly compatible with the *freedom of the will, as
(non-compatibilist) philosophers understand this notion
Thus, for example, the doctrine of pre-destination entails
that one’s final state is determined, but it does not entail that one is unfree with respect to all of the numerous deci-sions one makes over the course of one’s life Unlike Lutheranism, Calvinism has evolved out of the teachings
of more than one individual; besides Calvin, these include Zwingli, Melanchthon, and Bucer g.f.m
*compatibilism and incompatibilism
P Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas (Oxford, 2004).
J T McNeill, History and Character of Calvinism (Oxford, 1954).
Cambridge change.If a predicate is true of an object x at a time t, but not true of x at a later time, then x has
under-gone what P T Geach has called a ‘Cambridge change’ Many philosophers believe that Cambridge change is necessary but not sufficient for genuine *change For example, when my brother grows taller than me, I become shorter than him I have undergone a Cambridge change, but not a genuine change t.c
Sydney Shoemaker, ‘Causality and Properties’, in Identity, Cause and Mind (Cambridge, 1984).
Cambridge philosophy.In the Middle Ages Cambridge was a good deal smaller than Oxford and produced no philosopher to compare with Oxford’s Duns Scotus or Ockham Francis Bacon was the first important philoso-pher to study at Cambridge, although he, like Hobbes, Locke, and Bentham at Oxford, thought little of the instruction he had received at his university The first sig-nificant teachers of philosophy at Cambridge were the mid-seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists, espe-cially Cudworth and Henry More For the most part members of the strongly Calvinist Emmanuel College, they were hostile to all kinds of fanatical enthusiasm and argued for the rationality of religion against Calvinism, Laudian High Anglicanism, and the Erastianism of Hobbes They sought to found morality on reason, not will, whether of God or king, and, against Descartes’s mechanism argued that the world as a whole is a unity, animated throughout by purpose
Samuel Clarke, writing in the early years of the eight-eenth century, was the most mathematically minded of philosopher-theologians and very much a product of Newton’s Cambridge, although he did not teach there He defended, against Leibniz, Newton’s theory of space as absolute His abstract lucidities were echoed, towards the end of the century, in the ethics and theology of William Paley, Christian utilitarian and authoritative expounder of the ‘evidences’ of Christianity
A lonely figure in the unphilosophical Cambridge of the mid-nineteenth century was William Whewell His account of scientific thinking as *hypothetico-deductive, with hypothesis being prior to observation, was unfairly criticized, and unreasonably obliterated, by J S Mill Whewell’s views, unlike Mill’s, were based on wide experi-ence of scientific work and profound knowledge of the history of science John Grote revived philosophy in Cam-bridge later in the century, and by the end of it the subject
120 calculus
Trang 2philosophy in britain: early twentieth century
ludwig wittgenstein: his influence coursed twice
through Western philosophy, first via Logical Positivism in
the 1930s and 1940s, then through a diaspora of disciples in
the 1950s and 1960s The open texture and vatic style of his
writings allow endless discovery and reinterpretation
bertrand russell transcended the successive influences
of Bradley, Moore, Frege, and Wittgenstein to emerge as the most widely read British philosopher of the twentieth century
g e moore defended the value of common sense and
clar-ity in philosophy and inspired a generation of British
intel-lectuals with his ethical writings
r g collingwood, the last bastion of idealism in inter-war Oxford, stressed the historical nature of the philo-sophical enterprise
Trang 3was pursued there with distinction by the idealists James
Ward and J M E McTaggart—the second of whom
derived extra-ordinary conclusions with seemingly
rigor-ous logic from self-evident premisses in crystalline
prose—and the utilitarian moral philosopher Henry
Sidg-wick, an inspiring example of intellectual scrupulousness
Bertrand Russell and G E Moore, who were to
over-whelm the prevailing idealist consensus, were pupils
of these three In the first decade of this century Russell,
with A N Whitehead, produced Principia Mathematica,
expanding the range and increasing the systematic
charac-ter of logic and purporting to derive mathematics from it
He brought the topic of meaning to the centre of
philoso-phy and, with his theory of descriptions, supplied an
exemplary instance of how it should be analysed Moore
set about the doctrines of other philosophers, whether
idealists or utilitarians, with stolid but acute literalness
Russell and Moore agreed that there are many different
things, of different fundamental kinds, in the world and
that reality is not, as the idealists had concluded, one
all-inclusive mental or spiritual thing
Wittgenstein came to Cambridge to learn from Russell
and soon reversed the relationship There is nothing of
Moore in the Tractatus, in which the topics he and Russell
had worked on together are oracularly set out: an
intensely abstract account of the ultimate logical
con-stituents of the world and of our thought and speech
about it Absent from 1914 to 1929, he came back with a
point of view closer to Moore, at least in taking ordinary
language to be in need, not of replacement, but of a fuller,
deeper understanding Ramsey, the only disciple he seems
to have respected intellectually, was, like him and Russell,
a mathematician Dying at 26, he showed enormous
promise Wittgenstein dominated Cambridge philosophy
until his death in 1953 and for a considerable time
after-wards But since about 1960 Cambridge philosophy,
much like that of Oxford, has largely lost its distinctive
flavour, perhaps because of the reversal by the philosophy
of the United States of its former colonial dependence on
*London philosophy; Oxford philosophy; English
phil-osophy; British philosophy today
Cambridge PlatonistsA school of seventeenth-century
English philosophers who found in Platonism a way of
criticizing Hobbes and of defending Christianity against
the fanaticism of Puritans, Calvinists, and Prelatists
The Cambridge Platonists included Ralph Cudworth
(1617–80), who is perhaps best known, John Smith
(1618–52), Benjamin Whichcote (1609–83), and Nathaniel
Culverwell (1618–50) All these thinkers were from
Emmanuel College, and to these we can add Henry More
(1614–87) who was from Christ’s College Ralph
Cud-worth eventually became Master of Christ’s (for over
thirty years) and Professor of Hebrew in the University
His major work The True Intellectual System of the Universe
(1678) was conceived as a systematic refutation of
Hobbes, and indeed it was a major work of seventeenth-century philosophical thought What follows is an account of the main lines of argument of the Cambridge Platonists, especially as these are found in Cudworth and John Smith
Hobbes’s account of the mind was reductivist—he argued that it consisted of motions in the substance of the brain Perception consisted of a passive registration by the sense-organs of vibrations received from outside, ‘appar-itions’ or ‘seemings’, as Hobbes calls them John Smith in
his Discourse Concerning the Immortality of the Soul points
out, probably following Plotinus, that Hobbes has not dis-tinguished between the motions of material particles and our awareness of the motions He is maintaining, in other words, that Hobbes lacks an account of *consciousness Smith argues that there must be some incorporeal sub-stance through which we become aware of the ‘seemings’ and by means of which we can interpret and correct them For Smith, then, the senses presuppose a mind as their co-ordinating principle In a similar sort of way Cudworth presents a theory of knowledge which anticipates Kant: mind is not secondary and derivative but ‘senior to the world, and the architect thereof ’
The doctrine of the eternal and immutable character of
*morality is the most characteristic doctrine of the Cam-bridge Platonists Things, including morality, are as they are by nature and independently of our wills They have been created by a God whose will is subject to his wisdom and goodness The mind of man is derivative from the divine mind, which is itself antecedent to all corporeal things When human ideas are true they are readings of the divine thoughts In other words, there is a realm of intelligible ideas to which ‘good’ or ‘just’ belong, every bit
as much as geometrical truths These intelligible and changeless ideas are rational patterns in the mind of God and are accessible to human minds through the use of right reason It is clear from this that in their metaphysics and moral philosophy the Cambridge Platonists (influ-enced by Plato, Plotinus, and Descartes) totally reject Hobbes
In their philosophy of religion they reject *Calvinism, and in particular they reject both the doctrine of the total depravity of man since the Fall, and also the doctrine of predestination They believed in the power of each person
by the light of reason to move towards perfection It is also interesting to note that the Cambridge Platonists were themselves Puritans by origin and education Their Puri-tan dislike of ritual, vestments, and stained glass was of course supported by their belief in Platonism But they were mild and tolerant in their views and were sometimes called the ‘latitude men’ Their position had something in common with that of Milton, and pointed towards *deism and the moral sense theory of Shaftesbury r.s.d
*latitudinarianism
S Hutton, ‘The Cambridge Platonists’, in S Nadler (ed.), A Com-panion to Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford, 2002).
Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background (London,
1953)
122 Cambridge philosophy
Trang 4Campanella, Tommaso(1568–1639) A highly prolific
Ital-ian philosopher imprisoned for years by the Inquisition for
his *libertinism, Campanella was a contemporary of
fel-low Dominican Giordano Bruno, defender of Galileo
Galilei, and correspondent of the French libertines Gabriel
Naudé and François de La Mothe le Vayer In Atheismus
Trionfatus (1631), Campanella claimed to expose the
argu-ments for atheism in order to refute them—the triumph
over atheism of the title But because he proposed a form
of *deism, discoverable by the light of reason alone, of
which Christianity was just one manifestation and Christ
a preacher of a natural morality, the book was denounced
as proclaiming ‘atheism triumphant’, and pillaged for a
more decidedly atheistic tract, Theophrastus Redivivus In
Campanella’s utopian City of the Sun, investigation of
nature would benefit mankind, whether by means of
political and ethical laws or by technology Rulers would
use natural philosophy and scientific astrology, purged of
superstition, to control and transform the world l.p
G Ernst, Religione, ragione e natura: Studi su T Campanella (Milan,
1991)
F Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London,
1964)
Campbell, John (1956– ). British metaphysician and
philosopher of mind, at Berkeley, formerly at Oxford
Campbell’s distinctive approach to metaphysics and the
philosophy of mind aims to reconcile a broadly Kantian
investigation of the structure of self-conscious thought
about an objective world with the results of empirical
enquiry into the nature of cognition Past, Space and Self
(1994) undertakes to map out the central conceptual skills
making up the human capacity for self-conscious thought
and distinguishing human beings from other animals
These conceptual skills involve capacities to think not just
about oneself, but also about space and time and the
nature of physical objects Reference and Consciousness
(2002) explores the functional role of conscious
experi-ence Campbell sees conscious attention to objects as
playing a foundational role in thought and action—a
foun-dational role that we can only understand through the
complex interactions between conscious attention and the
subpersonal information-processing mechanisms that
Camus, Albert(1913–60) Algerian French philosopher
who is best known for his concept of ‘the *absurd’, which
he described as ‘a widespread sensitivity of our times’ and
defined as a confrontation between our demands for
ratio-nality and justice and the ‘indifferent universe’ He
explored this idea in novels, The Stranger (1942), The Plague
(1947), and The Fall (1956), as well as philosophical essays,
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and The Rebel (1951) He was
born and grew up in war-torn north Africa, and memories
of the bitter civil war and his experiences under the Nazi
occupation permeated his philosophy Like his one-time
philosophical friend and colleague Jean-Paul Sartre, he
was obsessed with questions of responsibility, innocence,
and guilt in the face of overwhelming tragedy In The Plague, for example, he pits his characters against an
invis-ible, unpredictable, lethal enemy in order to explore the vicissitudes of responsibility in a situation for which no one can be blamed Nevertheless, there are heroes and
there are cads In his early novel The Stranger, by contrast,
Camus introduces us to a character who is utterly innocent, despite the fact that he violates virtually all of the dictates of
‘decent’ society, including the prohibition against murder Camus’s notion of ‘the absurd’ is best exemplified by the Greek mythological hero Sisyphus, who was con-demned by the gods to the endless, futile task of rolling a rock up a mountain Nevertheless, Camus assures us, Sisy-phus is happy He accepts his futile fate, but he also ‘rebels’
by scorning the gods In The Stranger, by contrast, the
pro-tagonist had simply accepted the absurdity of life, ‘open-ing up his heart to the benign indifference of the universe’ But Camus, like Sartre, also displays a deep appreciation of what we might call ‘original’ guilt, guilt that is inherent in
our very existence as human beings In The Fall, a
particu-larly perverse character named Jean-Baptiste Clamence, who was once a lawyer, makes the conflation of guilt and innocence a matter of philosophical principle How could one be innocent in a world that is absurd? Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 r.c.sol
*existentialism
D Sprintzen, Camus: A Critical Examination (Philadelphia, 1988).
Canadian philosophy.Something of Canada’s national character is reflected in the philosophical effort of three centuries Starting from 1665 with the teaching of the Ratio Studiorum at the Jesuit Collège in Quebec, empha-sis was placed on the writings of Aristotle and Aquinas which were thought to serve the higher objectives of the-ology From early in the nineteenth century, the philo-sophical programme of French Canada was to resist the attractions of the Protestant Reformation and the Enlight-enment In due course, efforts were made to articulate a positive Catholic philosophy which, as it emerged, under-wrote the ultramontanism which prevailed in French Canada until the 1960s In English Canada philosophy originated with the founding of the first universities in Maritimes in the eighteenth century In most cases, the university had a religious affiliation, and it is natural that there should have been a preoccupation with the philo-sophical foundations of religion Canada’s harsh climate also called forth a serious interest in the philosophy of nature, and her emerging social pluralism issued in the philosophical analysis of politics
Genuine philosophical ability was widely scattered across the country, and no English-speaking university could represent itself as the centre of philosophical effort
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; but Toronto began in the early 1920s to achieve a hegemony that would endure for nearly fifty years In 1929 the Insti-tute of Mediaeval Studies (later the Pontifical InstiInsti-tute) was established in that city, and it is to this day one of the
Canadian philosophy 123
Trang 5world’s leading centres for such work George Brett and
later Fulton H Anderson shaped the philosophy
depart-ment at the University of Toronto into one of the
fore-most places for the study of the history of philosophy
Canada had made substantial and internationally
rec-ognized contributions to medieval studies and the history
of philosophy generally, but in the 1960s the Quiet
Revo-lution was under way in Quebec, and everywhere Sputnik
worked its magic Canada came to know unprecedented
expansion of its universities, in both size and number In
Quebec philosophy became more vigorously secular and
made significant contributions to the intellectual
founda-tions of her own social transformation Anglophone
philosophers were turning their attention away from the
history of philosophy and from cultural self-examination,
and were positioning themselves in research programmes
set elsewhere, chiefly those of the analytic philosophers of
Cambridge, of positivism and its critics, mainly in the
United States, of Oxford linguistic philosophy, and of
post-war phenomenology and existentialism in France and
Germany
The University of Western Ontario assembled an
inter-nationally recognized team of philosophers of science,
and a monograph series was launched The Canadian
Philosophical Association originated its official journal,
Dialogue, in 1961, and this was followed ten years later by
the Canadian Journal of Philosophy and Russell: The Journal of
the Bertrand Russell Archives (based at McMaster
Univer-sity) In the same year the Society for Exact Philosophy
came into being Laval théologique et philosophique was born
in 1945, and Philosophiques in 1974.
After the transformations of the 1960s it may be said
that professional Canadian philosophy lost much of the
discernibly Canadian character that it had had previously
Canadian researchers now work on specialized problems,
and employ methods to do so, which resist narrowly
national definition Even so, there are exceptions to this
trend George Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965) and
Tech-nology and Empire (1969) had an influence well beyond the
universities, and did much to underwrite a resurgence of
Canadian cultural nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s
Grant’s work was in the main greeted
unsympathetic-ally by academicunsympathetic-ally based philosophers They found its
arguments unrigorous and its Platonized anglicanism
over-sentimental Thus, while several Canadians, both at
home and abroad, are in the forefront of various branches
of philosophical enquiry, less amply exemplified are
con-centrations of ‘analytically approved’ research
accom-plishment that have a recognizably Canadian ‘signature’
In the case of Australia, one tends to think of materialism;
present-day Oxford calls to mind neo-Kantianism; and so
on In some areas, Canadians have achieved dominance,
whether in Gauthier’s work on contractarian ethics, van
Fraassen’s promotion of constructive empiricism, the
Woods–Walton approach to fallacy theory, or the
develop-ment of preservationist variations of paraconsistent
logic by Peter Schotch, R E Jennings, and Bryson Brown
In only one area, however, can there be said to exist a
professionally well-respected signature that reflects a dis-tinctively Canadian philosophical character This is the philosophy of multiculturalism, typified by the works of Will Kymlicka Leslie Armour has also provided the estimable service of showing how deep is the Canadian intellectual preoccupation with multiculturalism, which pre-dates by generations Quebec’s Quiet Revolution So Kymlicka (and certain of his critics, such as Edward Andrew) are building upon a thick analytical foundation
In the Canadian tradition, a just citizenship must respect a fundamental difference between the rights of immigrants and the constitutionally protected distinctive-ness of aboriginals and Québécois While all immigrants must have the right to acquire citizenship, neither Can-adian policy nor practice favours an open border So there
is a problem about what ethno-cultural justice requires in the case of illegals, or ‘metrics’ as Kymlicka calls them Both Charles Taylor and Kymlicka reflect in their writings the Canadian openness to ethnic diversity Taylor sees religion as essential to ‘deep diversity’ Kymlicka concedes the impossibility of separating culture and politics, but favours the expungement of the religious from the polit-ical Canadian multicultural politics is an accommodation
of cleavages both ethnic and linguistic It is not surprising, therefore, that her leading political philosophers should emphasize the Canadian confederal state as the appropri-ate governing structure Some critics see in these arrange-ments the loss of Canada’s former distinctiveness, its replacement by a timorous and unconfident new nation-alism of the affirmative of otherness, and a misappropri-ation of the founding rmisappropri-ationale of confedermisappropri-ation j.woo
*American philosophy; Australian philosophy
Dialogue: The Canadian Philosophical Review (1986): vol 25 mainly
devoted to philosophy in Canada
Leslie Armour, The Idea of Canada and the Crisis of Community
(Ottawa, 1981)
Will Kymlicka and Magda Opalski (eds.), Can Liberal Pluralism be Exported? Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe (Oxford, 2002).
Cantor, Georg (1845–1918) Cantor created the math-ematics of the *infinite as well as effectively creating *set
theory A set has the same number of members as another
if each member of either set can be paired with a unique member of the other If a set can be put into such a one-to-one correspondence with the integers it is said to be denumerable Cantor demonstrated the denumerability
of algebraic numbers (roots of polynomial equations with
integer coefficients), and the non-denumerability of the
real numbers, numbers whose decimal expansion need not repeat or terminate (1873, diagonal proof 1891) Can-tor’s continuum hypothesis (there is no set intermediate
in size between the integers and the real numbers) was proved by P J Cohen (1963), following a partial result by Gödel (1938), to be consistent with but underivable from
Joseph Warren Dauben, Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philo-sophy of the Infinite (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).
124 Canadian philosophy
Trang 6Cantor’s paradox.How many points are there in a line
segment? As Cantor’s diagonal proof reveals, infinitely
more than there are integers And in the infinite plane? Just
as many as there are in the line segment Indeed and in
general, precisely as many as there are in a space of n
dimensions, n≥1 ‘I see it,’ Cantor wrote to Dedekind,
‘but I don’t believe it.’ Is this infinite number of points,
then, the highest degree of *infinity available? No Cantor
also proved that for any set, a set with more members (the
original set’s power set, consisting of all its subsets) is
constructible Thus there is no greatest set Hence also
(Cantor’s paradox) there is not a set of all sets, since such
a supposed total set would at once yield a larger one
j.j.m
M M Zuckerman, Sets and Transfinite Numbers (New York, 1974).
capacity.A capacity is a *power or ability (either natural
or acquired) of a *thing or person, and as such one of its
real (because causally effective) properties The natural
capacities of inanimate objects, such as the capacity of
cop-per to conduct electricity, are dispositional procop-perties
whose ascription entails the truth of corresponding
sub-junctive conditionals, such as that an electric current
would flow in a copper wire if a potential difference were
applied to its ends But the capacities of persons the
exer-cise of which is subject to their voluntary control, such as
a person’s capacity to speak English, do not sustain such a
pattern of entailments and are consequently not strictly
*dispositions Ascribing to something a capacity to F is not
the same as saying that it is naturally possible for that thing
to F, since circumstances can obtain in which a thing’s
capacity to F cannot be exercised. e.j.l
*causality; propensity; potentiality
R Tuomela (ed.), Dispositions (Dordrecht, 1978).
capitalism. The modern, market-based,
commodity-producing economic system controlled by ‘capital’, that
is, purchasing-power used to hire labour for wages The
term was first used prominently, and pejoratively, by
Marx, but for defenders of the system it has become a term
of praise
Marx sees the origins of capitalism in the forcible
expro-priation of European peasants and small artisans during
the later Middle Ages, leading to a separation between the
*bourgeoisie or capitalist class, who privately own the
means of production, and the proletariat or working class
Possessing no such means, proletarians can live only by
selling their labour power to members of the bourgeoisie
Ownership of the means of production gives the
bour-geoisie a decisive bargaining advantage over the
prole-tariat, which shows itself in the form of the profit and
interest on capital, resulting from the *exploitation of
wage labour One central claim of Marxian economics is
that capitalism has been responsible for a colossal growth
in humanity’s productive capabilities Another is that
cap-ital has an inherent tendency to accumulate,
concentrat-ing social power in the hands of the capitalist class and
bringing the exploited working class more and more under its economic domination The potential for a higher society and a better life which capitalism has made pos-sible can be realized for the vast majority only if the workers are emancipated from the domination of capital Defenders of capitalism deny the charge that wage labourers are exploited, citing the indispensable economic functions performed by capitalists, such as managerial and supervisory labour, saving, and the assumption of risks Critics of capitalism respond that in principle there is no reason why these functions must be performed by capital-ists Workers need not be supervised by those who repre-sent interests antagonistic to theirs; capitalists typically bear fewer burdens of deprivation than workers do for the sake of social saving, and if capitalists are rewarded for risk-taking, the system offers no similar rewards to work-ers, who nevertheless risk losing their livelihood when an enterprise fails They see capitalists as ‘rewarded’ for per-forming these functions only because the system gives them greater control over production, saving, and risk-taking, hence putting them in a position to reap the fruits
of economic co-operation, accumulation, and good for-tune Profit and interest on capital are not rewards for managing, saving, and risk-taking, but rather conse-quences of capital’s social power to exploit labour
To this defenders of capitalism will reply that the failure
of the Soviet system reveals capitalism to be the most effi-cient way yet discovered to manage a modern economic system To grant this point, however, is not in the least to concede that capitalism is not exploitative, only that we have yet to find an efficient modern economic system which does not exploit workers It is doubtless a troubling fact that we have not, but this fact provides us with no rea-son for feeling any loyalty to the capitalist system and leaves untouched the basic Marxian reason to seek an
*anti-communism; democracy and capitalism; global-ization, morality, and politics
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York, 1974) Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, 1982) Karl Marx, Capital, tr Ben Fowkes and David Fernbach (London,
1976)
Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London, 1983) Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New
York, 1951)
Paul Sweezy, Theory of Capitalist Development (London, 1962).
capital punishment.The question whether it is morally permissible for the state to execute any of its citizens and, if so, under what circumstances, has been debated
by philosophers, sociologists, and politicians ever since the middle of the eighteenth century The arguments supporting capital punishment have usually been divided into those based on ‘justice’, which in this context simply means retribution, and those based on ‘utility’ The appeal to *justice usually takes the following form: people deserve to suffer for wrongdoing In the case of criminal wrongdoing the suffering takes the form of legal
capital punishment 125
Trang 7*punishment; and justice requires that the most severe
crimes, especially murder, be punished with the severest
penalty—death It should be emphasized that somebody
who reasons in this way is not committed to a defence of
the *lex talionis—the principle of ‘an eye for an eye’.
There are four major utilitarian arguments favouring
the death penalty It is said to deter, and to prevent the
exe-cuted criminals from repeating their crimes, it is less cruel
than life imprisonment (and hence should be welcomed
by the criminal), and it brings a measure of satisfaction to
the family and friends of the victim as well as to other
citi-zens outraged by the crime
Of the arguments against capital punishment by far the
most important is that sooner or later innocent persons
are certain to be executed The only way to avoid this is to
abolish capital punishment altogether Another argument
is that capital punishment lowers the ‘tone’ of the society
in which it is practised Civilized societies do not tolerate
the torture of prisoners and they would not do so even if
torture could be shown to have a deterrent effect It has
also been argued by Dostoevsky and Camus that capital
punishment is unjust on retributionist assumptions
because the anticipatory suffering of the person who is to
be executed is immeasurably greater than that of his
vic-tim Finally, Arthur Koestler and Clarence Darrow have
argued that capital punishment must be unjust because
human beings never act freely and hence should not be
blamed and punished for even the most terrible acts
Koestler did not see that this argument would undermine
all punishment Darrow saw this and favoured the
aboli-tion of punishment altogether (as distinct from detenaboli-tion
for purposes of social protection)
By way of commentary it should be mentioned that
stat-istical studies in all parts of the world have shown that
capital punishment does not deter, or rather that its
deter-rent effect is no greater than that of life imprisonment If
anything, capital punishment tends to inflame certain
dis-turbed individuals and thus leads to an increase in murder
This fact, together with what is known about the fallibility
of witnesses and juries and the bias and even corruption of
prosecutors, has convinced many educated persons
throughout the world, regardless of their political
affili-ation, that there is no place for capital punishment in a
H A Bedau (ed.), The Death Penalty in America, 4th edn (New
York, 1988)
—— ‘Capital Punishment’, in H LaFollette (ed.), The Oxford
Handbook to Practical Ethics (Oxford, 2003).
Thorsten Sellin (ed.), Capital Punishment (New York, 1967).
care, ethics of.This term refers to a group of moral
reflec-tions about the moral emotion and virtue of care that
emerged from feminist theory The hypothesis that
‘women speak in a different voice’—‘the voice of care’—
rose to prominence in Carol Gilligan’s book In a Different
Voice (1982) Through empirical research, she claimed to
discover a female voice stressing empathic association
with others and a sense of being responsible and caring
Gilligan thus identified two modes of relationship and two modes of moral thinking: an ethic of care and an ethic of rights
Allied developments then occurred in philosophical ethics For example, Annette Baier argued that the reason-ing and methods of women in ethical theory is noticeably different from traditional theories She found in them the same different voice that Gilligan heard She criticizes the near-exclusive emphasis in traditional moral philosophy
on universal rules and principles, to the neglect of sym-pathy with and concern for others The ethics of care there-fore promotes traits in intimate personal relationships, such as sympathy, compassion, fidelity, discernment,
*feminism; feminist philosophy
A Baier, Moral Prejudices (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
Carnap, Rudolf(1891–1970) German empiricist philoso-pher and logician who moved to the United States in 1935 Carnap was a pupil of Frege and much influenced by him,
as well as by Russell and Wittgenstein He was a prom-inent member of the *Vienna Circle and a leading expo-nent of *Logical Positivism before the Second World War Technical rigour was a hallmark of his important contri-butions to formal semantics, the philosophy of science, and the foundations of inductive *probability
Carnap’s most important early work was Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1928), translated under the title The Logical Structure of the World (1967) This attempted to spell
out in some detail the radical empiricist programme of reconstructing human knowledge of the social and physical world and other minds on the basis of individual experience, using as the sole starting-point the relation of remembered similarity between experiences Carnap originally believed that all meaningful physical concepts were definable in terms of experience, in accordance with
a strong version of the principle of *verifiability Later he moderated this view to accommodate the fact that the language of physics is not exhaustively translatable into the language of sense experience He also came to put more emphasis on his belief that the method of
con-struction used in the Aufbau could with equal legitimacy
be used to construct individual psychology on a physic-alist basis
In The Logical Syntax of Language (1934; Eng tr 1937),
Carnap deployed his technical skills to develop a rigorous formal account of the structure of any possible language, seeing this as a necessary preliminary to the pursuit of the only form of philosophical inquiry deemed legitimate by him—logical analysis In the foreword of that book he memorably states his view that ‘Philosophy is to
be replaced by the logic of science [and] the logic of science
is nothing other than the logical syntax of the language of science’ (p xiii) Later, however, Carnap became more concerned with the *semantics of natural and formal lan-guages, doing work which culminated in his important
and influential book Meaning and Necessity (1947), which
126 capital punishment
Trang 8laid the foundations of much subsequent work in the
semantics of *modal logic In that book Carnap argues in
favour of an alternative to Frege’s theory of *sense and
ref-erence, called by him the ‘method of extension and
inten-sion’ Carnap held that this method provided the most
economical account of the logical behaviour of
expres-sions in modal contexts—for instance, the expresexpres-sions ‘9’
and ‘7’ in the sentence ‘9 is necessarily greater than 7’ His
criticism of Frege involved a rejection of the traditional
category of *names, conceived as a class of expressions
each of which stood for a unique thing
After the Second World War, Carnap’s energies were
increasingly devoted to the development of inductive
logic as a branch of probability theory, resulting in his
magisterial volume Logical Foundations of Probability (1950)
and many subsequent publications This interest was
con-tinuous with his earlier ones, since his concern was to put
on a rigorous footing the notion, central to scientific
method, of the confirmation of a hypothesis by empirical
evidence Although he had abandoned a strong form of
the principle of verifiability, he continued to adhere to a
fundamentally empiricist theory of meaning which
required scientific hypotheses to be susceptible to empirical
confirmation He also, in consequence, adhered to the
*analytic–synthetic distinction, notwithstanding the
stric-tures of W V Quine—though their differences on this
issue were perhaps less substantial than they appeared to
be, since Carnap was always insistent that logical
princi-ples themselves are always a matter for freely chosen
con-vention, to be justified on pragmatic grounds In all
matters of logic and mathematics, Carnap espoused what
he called the principle of tolerance: ‘It is not our business
to set up prohibitions, but to arrive at conventions’
*confirmation; formal and material mode
R Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudoproblems in
Philosophy, tr R A George (London, 1967).
—— Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic,
2nd edn (Chicago, 1956)
P A Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (La Salle, Ill.,
1963)
Carneades(214–129bc) Head of Plato’s *Academy, who
followed Arcesilaus in emphasizing the sceptical rather
than the dogmatic elements in Plato’s legacy Carneades
scandalized Cato the Elder by arguing in favour of justice
and against it on successive days Holding that certainty is
impossible and that we should always suspend
judge-ment, he nevertheless claimed that we should be guided
by the ‘probable’ (in the sense of ‘approvable’ or
persua-sive, not of statistical likelihood) Criticizing both Stoic
and Epicurean views in the debate on freedom and
determinism, he anticipated Gilbert Ryle on the truth of
future contingents and Richard Taylor on agent
caus-ation; but whether he himself did, or as a Sceptic
consist-ently could, assert a libertarian position is controversial
r.w.s
A A Long, Hellenistic Philosophy (London, 1974).
—— and D N Sedley (eds.), The Hellenistic Philosophers
(Cam-bridge, 1987) Texts and commentary
Carroll, Lewis(1832–98) Pseudonym of the Revd Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics don at Christ Church, Oxford Best known for his Alice stories, which brim over with logical puzzles and absurdities and have been duly pillaged by philosophers Coming at the tail-end of the degenerating programme of Aristotelian logic, his contri-butions to formal logic are inevitably insignificant, their only lasting value being their testimony to his inimitable talent for devising extraordinary syllogisms Carroll’s most important philosophical article is the characteristic-ally quaint and deceptively light ‘What the Tortoise Said
to Achilles’ (Mind (1895) ) He hints at a deep problem
about the epistemology of valid inference, demonstrating that the acceptance of a rule of inference cannot be identi-fied with the acceptance of a conditional proposition
a.d.o
J Fisher (ed.), The Magic of Lewis Carroll (London, 1973) Special centenary issue of the journal Mind (1995), including the
original 1895 article
Cartesianism.Name given to the movement inaugurated
by René Descartes (after ‘Cartesius’, the Latin version of his name); it shaped the philosophical landscape of the early modern period, and its influence, even today, is by
no means entirely exhausted In the decades following Descartes’s death, Cartesianism was seen primarily as a new programme for physical science, based on
math-ematical principles Descartes had defined matter as res extensa, or ‘extended substance’, that is to say, whatever
has length, breadth, and height The Cartesian pro-gramme was to exhibit all physical phenomena as explic-able in terms of the ‘modes’ or modifications of extension;
in effect, this meant showing how all the apparent com-plexity and diversity of matter could be accounted for sim-ply by reference to the size, shape, and motion of the particles of which it was composed ‘I freely
acknow-ledge’, Descartes had written in his Principles of Philosophy
(1644) ‘that I recognize no matter in corporeal *things apart from that which the geometers call quantity, and take as the object of their demonstrations, i.e that to which every kind of division shape and motion is applic-able’ (pt ii, art 64)
The appeal of the Cartesian approach in the latter half
of the seventeenth century undoubtedly owed much to its rejection of occult forms and qualities, and its insistence that physics should invoke only the ‘clearly and distinctly perceivable’ properties of mathematics A growing body
of critics, however, pointed out that mere extension in three dimensions could yield only an inert and passive uni-verse To generate *motion in the system, the Cartesians had to have recourse to God, whom Descartes had described as ‘the primary cause of motion, who in the beginning created matter along with its motion and rest, and now preserves the same amount of motion as he put
there in the beginning’ (Principles, pt ii, art 36) Though
Cartesianism 127
Trang 9this may seem to be a piece of ad hoc metaphysics, the cash
value of the appeal to immutable and continuous divine
action in the Cartesian system was the rejection of the
Aristotelian assumption that all matter tended ‘naturally’
to come to rest, and its replacement with the Cartesian
principle of the persistence of motion in a straight line
(what has subsequently come to be known as the law of
inertia) The idea of the conservation of motion was
highly influential for the subsequent development of
physics In later Newtonian physics, however, what is
conserved is mass times velocity, and neither of these
notions is to be found in Descartes; as the working-out of
Descartes’s ‘rules of impact’ make clear, what is conserved
is ‘quantity of motion’, measured simply as the product of
size (volume) and speed (the latter factor, unlike the more
modern notion of velocity, is not held to be affected by a
change in direction of motion)
Although, from a scientific point of view, the eventual
downfall of Cartesian physics was a result of Isaac
New-ton’s formulating mathematical covering laws of far
greater predictive power than anything Descartes had
been able to devise, many of the philosophical debates
over Cartesianism centred on its denial of any inherent
power or force in matter To some, notably Descartes’s
deviant disciple Nicolas Malebranche, this was a positive
advantage: if *causality involves the necessitating of
effects, only God has the requisite power to count as a
genuine causal agent; matter is, of itself, wholly inert—
mere ‘extended stuff ’ For G W Leibniz, by contrast, it is
a violation of the *principle of sufficient reason to see
physics as merely a series of arbitrary, divinely decreed
covering laws; the behaviour of matter must proceed
from something inherent in its nature, and hence (contra
the Cartesians), some recourse must be had to the notion
of force or power in things Such debates indicate the
extent to which the ‘new’ Cartesian physics opened up
serious questions about the nature of causation in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth century, paving the way
for David Hume’s eventual radical critique of the very
idea of causal power
Among philosophers today, the main feature of
Carte-sianism which remains of interest is its theory of the mind
Descartes, in the celebrated theory known as *dualism,
had maintained that the mind is an entirely separate
sub-stance from the body, and, moreover, that its nature is
wholly distinct from the nature of anything physical: it is
an incorporeal, indivisible, non-spatial, unextended thing,
which is ‘entirely distinct from the body, and would not
fail to be what it is even if the body did not exist’ (Discourse
on the Method, pt iv) The Cartesian view of the mind as a
*‘ghost in the machine’ of the body (to use Gilbert Ryle’s
celebrated phrase) has few takers nowadays To begin
with, its view of the nature of the mind remains essentially
obscure: we are simply told what the mind is not (not
extended, not divisible), but are not given any
explana-torily satisfying account of what it is Moreover, even
granted the existence of such supposed purely spiritual
substance, it is far from clear how it could interact with the
mechanism of the body in the required way When I decide to go for a walk my legs move, but if the chain of impulses generating the requisite muscle movements is traced back through the nervous system to the brain, the causal process is somehow mysteriously initiated by a ghostly *‘volition’ whose nature, and relationship to the observed physical events, remains beyond the reach of explanatory science The form of Cartesianism proposed
by Descartes’s disciples in the late seventeenth century was content to leave mind–body correlations as irre-ducible regularities decreed by God: God obligingly ordains that the required bodily movements occur when I decide to go for a walk; conversely, he ordains that sensa-tions of an appropriate kind (e.g of pain or of colour) should ‘arise’ in the soul when the organs of the body are stimulated Cartesianism thus typically leads to an *‘occa-sionalism’ with respect to the relation between mind and body: bodily events are the ‘occasion’ for the production
of mental events and vice versa, but such productivity remains beyond the reach of human science—not just something we cannot so far explain, but something that
no scientific account, however sophisticated, could ever
in principle explain
Cartesian attempts to resolve this puzzle tended to gen-erate further obscurities Descartes himself sometimes seems to have viewed the mind or soul as a kind of non-physical ‘homunculus’ dwelling inside the brain (he iden-tified the *pineal gland or conarion as the ‘principal seat’ of the soul) Some scholastic philosophers had argued for the existence of a common sensorium where the data from the five specialized senses are integrated (a notion
can-vassed by Aristotle (see De anima, bk iii, ch 1, 425a14) ) One might have expected Descartes to have rejected this idea, both in the light of his resolute hostility to received scholastic doctrine, and also because of his conception of the mind as an incorporeal substance; in fact, however, he not only accepted it, but incorporated it into his own the-ory of mind–body interaction The pineal gland receives data (via the nerves) from all parts of the body, and it is only after the data have been integrated in the gland into a unitary signal or impression that any sensory awareness can occur ‘The mind’, Descartes wrote in the Sixth Medi-tation, ‘is not immediately affected by all parts of the body, but only by the brain, or perhaps just by one small part of the brain, namely the part containing the “common
sense”.’ In his later work, The Passions of the Soul, Descartes
observes that ‘there must necessarily be some place where the two images coming through the two eyes, or the two impressions coming from a single object through the double organs of any other sense, can come together in a single image or impression before reaching the soul, so that they do not present to it two objects instead of one’ (art 32) The argument is a curious one, since it is not at first sight apparent why a unitary image in the conscious mind requires a unitary signal or impression in the brain Writing to Mersenne on 24 December 1640, Descartes reflected that ‘the only alternative is to suppose that the soul is not joined immediately to any solid part of the
128 Cartesianism
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con-cavities, and which enter or leave it continually like the
water of a river That would certainly be thought too
absurd.’ The suggestion seems far from absurd to the
modern reader, accustomed to the notion that
*con-sciousness arises from just such a shifting and elusive
inter-play of electrical activity in the cerebral cortex But to have
contemplated the possibility that consciousness could
arise from purely physical processes would have taken
Descartes away from dualism entirely, and have made the
notion of a separate substance called the mind or soul
redundant—a step the Cartesians were not prepared to
take, since they followed Descartes in insisting that the
complexities of conscious thought could never be
explained by the operations of ‘mere matter’
The reason that the Cartesian approach to the mind is
not yet extinct is that some philosophers continue to
maintain that there is something about consciousness that
eludes the explanatory apparatus of physical science Here
a further feature of Cartesianism has been very influential,
namely its stress on the subjective or ‘first-personal’
aspects of human experience The Cartesian search for
knowledge starts from the private meditations of the
soli-tary thinker; and in the course of those meditations
Descartes rapidly arrives at the doctrine of the perfect
‘transparency’ of the mind—the view that I have direct
and privileged access to the contents of my mind, and that
I know my own nature as a conscious being better than
that of any ‘external’ objects From here, Descartes moves
on to the conclusion that my own experiences (e.g of
hunger, thirst, pleasure, and pain) have a phenomenal
character that is vividly accessible ‘from the inside’, but
which necessarily lacks the kind of objective clarity and
distinctness that belongs to the quantitative language of
physical science This notion of the essential privacy of our
conscious experience has been attacked in our own
cen-tury, notably by Ludwig Wittgenstein, but still retains a
hold Thus the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel
has argued that the character of experience, ‘what it is like’
for the experiencing organism, cannot be captured by any
physicalist account of the world Such a perspective may
not inappropriately be called ‘Cartesian’ even though its
advocates tend to reject Descartes’s doctrine of a
non-physical separable substance called ‘the mind’, since it
continues to be held that certain aspects of the mental are
sui generis and not reducible to the objective descriptions
of physics Although it is too early to say whether such
residual Cartesianism will retain a permanent
philosoph-ical foothold, its present survival, over 300 years after the
death of its founder, is testimony to the enduring appeal
of Descartes’s approach to the complex problem of
con-sciousness and its relation to the physical word j.cot
*light of nature
D M Clarke, Occult Powers and Hypotheses (Oxford, 1989).
T M Lennon et al (eds.), Problems of Cartesianism (Kingston, 1982).
L E Loeb, From Descartes to Hume (Ithaca, NY, 1981).
S Nadler, Causation in Early Modern Philosophy (Pennsylvania,
1993)
T Schmaltz, Radical Cartesianism (Cambridge, 2002).
R A Watson, The Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ, 1987)
Cartwright, Nancy (1943– ) American philosopher (at Stanford and the London School of Econoics) who views the higher-level laws of physics as instruments of explan-ation and prediction which are not true, and whose pre-dictive and explanatory value does not require them to be true Unlike many instrumentalists, she is a realist about the causal factors mentioned by the *laws—including so-called ‘theoretical entities’ generally considered unob-servable The phenomena that physicists try to explain, she says, are produced by interactions of non-Humean causal factors which are too numerous, whose interac-tions are too complicated, and whose influences differ too much from one physical setting to another for the phe-nomena they produce to be systematically explained or predicted without recourse to simplifications, idealiza-tions, and unrealistic generalizations The falsity of the laws, simplifications, and idealizations are the price physi-cists must pay for useful and cognitively manageable pic-tures of the physical universe Cartwright has written extensively on scientific explanation, the epistemology of science, and problems in the philosophy of quantum physics She was married to Stuart Hampshire j.b.b
*methodology
Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford, 1983).
—— The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science
(Cam-bridge, 1999)
Cassirer, Ernst (1874–1945) German philosopher who was a neo-Kantian, but differed from Kant in two respects First, while he agreed that we need some a priori *cat-egories to organize experience, these are not, as Kant believed, the same at all times: our categories develop over history Second, his early researches in the philoso-phy of science, especially on the mathematization of physics, led him beyond Kant’s central focus on scientific knowledge to a consideration of all symbolizing activ-ities—language, myth, religion, etc.—which are, on his view, the distinguishing feature of man and are all, along with science, of equal status
His Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–31; tr New
Haven, Conn., 1953–7) attempts to give a unified account
of ‘symbolic representation’ Our systems of symbols con-stitute the world, since there is no reality in itself apart from our symbolizations Conversely, man himself is essentially the source of various symbolizing activities The philosopher’s task is thus to describe man’s symboliz-ing activities, and the categories involved in them,
*neo-Kantianism
P A Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (New York, 1949).
casuistry.The art of resolving problems of *conscience The starting-point for the exercise of casuistry is the
casuistry 129