The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 33 doc

The work of these philosophers and their con-temporaries covers most of the field of analytic philoso-phy, especially philosophy of science, and amounts to a vigorous and extensive contri

The second proposition, that the non-I is determined by

the I, gives rise to the practical Wissenschaftslehre, and this

is, for Fichte, crucial to the I’s construction of the world

First, the I’s motive for producing a world, and a world of

a certain type, is to have a field for its activity, primarily for

the performance of its moral duty Second, it is only with

the practical Wissenschaftslehre that the world ceases to be

merely a network of ideas (Vorstellungen) and becomes

genuinely objective with respect to the I The

perform-ance of duty requires the existence of other Is on a par with

myself and I must regard other people as independent

centres of consciousness and activity, not simply as my

own ideas But if the world is perceived by other beings, as

well as myself, it is relatively independent of myself and

my mental states

In other works of the period, notably The Science of

Rights (1796–7; tr London, 1889) and The Science of Ethics

(1798; tr London, 1897), Fichte develops the implications

of practical Wissenschaftslehre The latter work attempts to

derive the content of our duties from the mere fact that

we must act morally, arguing, for example, that since

moral activity requires the existence of others, we have

a duty not to kill others or otherwise impair their capacity

for moral activity The Science of Rights applies ethical

principles to law, the family, individual rights within

the state, and relations between states The state exists to

protect the rights of its citizens and is ‘nothing but an

abstract conception; only the citizens, as such, are actual

persons’ States should form a confederation to secure

the freedom of all men, and ultimately all men

should belong to a single commonwealth This did

not prevent him from arguing, in The Closed Commercial

State (1800), that a state should rigidly control the

eco-nomic activity of its citizens and prohibit international

trade

Fichte’s doctrines so far are well summarized in The

Vocation of Man (1800; tr New York, 1956), in which he

considers three increasingly adequate views of the world:

first, naturalistic *determinism, which dissolves man’s

freedom in the ‘rigid necessity of nature’; second,

theor-etical *idealism, which reduces the world, including oneself

and other people, to a ‘system of pictures’; and third,

prac-tical idealism, in which oneself and others emerge as free,

but embodied, moral agents occupying an objective

world The work concludes with the affirmation that God

is the moral order of the world and that we exist ‘only in

God and through God’ But after about 1800 Fichte’s

thought underwent a change In the Wissenschaftslehre of

1794 he contrasted his own philosophy, idealism, with the

‘dogmatism’ or realism of such thinkers as Spinoza (He

claimed that which of these philosophies one adopts

depends on what kind of man you are, but he also gave

reasons, such as dogmatism’s inability to explain

con-sciousness and freedom, for preferring idealism.) But now

he moves closer to Spinoza, and to Schelling In The Way

to the Blessed Life or the Doctrine of Religion (1806) and in

vari-ous other works of the period—including later

rework-ings of the Wissenschaftslehre—the ‘infinite impulse’ of the

I is no longer independent and self-sustaining, but

emanates from an ‘absolute being’ (Sein) which cannot

itself come into being, change, or pass away, and which

Fichte also calls God, the Word (Logos), and the Absolute.

Finite things are still deduced as products of conscious-ness But the infinite activity of consciousness is now deduced from the end of ‘imitating’ God, and our voca-tion is more the ‘blessed life’ of contemplating God than moral activity One of the problems that led Fichte to this conclusion seems to have been the difficulty of maintain-ing that the I that produces the world and that does

not, until a fairly late stage of the Wissenschaftslehre, con-trast with other Is (‘you’ and ‘s/he’) is in any significant

sense an ‘I’ rather than an ‘it’ (Hegel contended that Fichte’s absolute I amounts to much the same as pure being.)

Throughout his career Fichte held that the vocation of man is to restore on a higher plain the pure absolute from

which the Wissenschaftslehre began, whether this be the I

or being, and whether the restoration of it consist in philo-sophical or religious insight, moral perfection, or political harmony Thus his thought operates on two levels First, there is a logical development of the relation between the absolute (I, being) and its manifestation; this occurs in his more esoteric works Second, there is a psychological his-tory of the stages of reflection by which this logical rela-tion is revealed to the finite subject; this tends to appear in

his more popular works In Characteristics of the Present Age

(1806), he presented a universal history, advancing from the ‘Arcadian’ stage of ‘instinctive reason’, by way of the

‘complete sinfulness’ of the ‘state based on needs’ (Noth-staat), to the ‘Elysian’ stage of ‘artistic reason’ Under the

influence of Schiller, the aesthetic is assigned a crucial role

in reconciling the antitheses of the Wissenschaftslehre But

in other works religion is more prominent than art

According to The Way to the Blessed Life absolute being is

refracted by consciousness into an endless variety of indi-vidual forms But this world of phenomena and its relation

to the absolute is conceived by human reflection in five historically successive stages: (1) empirical phenomena are seen as the sole reality; (2) the ultimate reality is seen as

a law-governed community of free, independent persons, with equal rights; (3) the heroic moral life devoted to the realization of the divine will, of the ideas underlying art, science, politics, and religion; (4) the religious withdrawal from heroic conduct into the recognition of all earthly life

as a manifestation of the divine; (5) clear philosophical understanding of the plan of existence and of the unity

of all men in a community of free intelligences with a common purpose: ‘Religion without science is a mere faith, though an immovable faith; science supersedes all faith and converts it into insight.’ At this last stage absolute being has in a sense been restored to its original purity

Fichte’s earlier thought had an immense influence on younger philosophers, especially Schelling and Hegel: Hegel’s philosophical method, for example, derives

largely from Fichte, and his Phenomenology of Spirit is the

300 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb

culmination of the tradition represented by Fichte’s

philo-sophical histories Fichte also influenced the literary

works of such Romantics as Novalis and their concept of

irony: ‘The three greatest tendencies of the age are the

French revolution, Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, and

Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’ (F Schlegel). m.j.i

*Kantianism

R Adamson, Fichte (Edinburgh, 1881).

F Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vii: Modern Philosophy, pt 1:

Fichte to Hegel (Westminster, Md., 1963).

D Henrich, Fichte’s Original Insight, in D E Christensen (ed.),

Contemporary German Philosophy, i (University Park, Penn.,

1982)

X Léon, Fichte et son temps, 3 vols (Paris, 1916–28).

E Tugendhat, Self-consciousness and Self-determination

(Cam-bridge, Mass., 1986)

Ficino, Marsilio (1433–99) Italian philosopher who

pro-duced Latin translations of all Plato’s dialogues, along

with a number of Neoplatonic works, making the

com-plete corpus accessible to Western scholars for the first

time He also wrote commentaries on several of the

dia-logues, most notably the Symposium (1469), where he

pre-sented his influential theory of Platonic love as an

attraction which moves from a physical to a spiritual

plane, ultimately leading the lover to God Shortly after

being ordained a priest in 1473, he completed his Theologia

Platonica, in which he demonstrated that rational

confirmation of the Christian belief in the personal

immortality of the soul could be found in the doctrines

of the Platonists He argued that *Platonism, unlike

*Aristotelianism, was fundamentally compatible with

Christianity and claimed for it a central place in the

*Neoplatonism

G C Garfagnini (ed.), Marsilio Ficino e il ritorno di Platone: Studi e

documenti, 2 vols (Florence, 1986).

fiction.Fiction raises puzzles not only about what kind of

thing fictional characters are, but also about our attitudes

to what is not real In reading a novel or seeing a drama,

people apparently feel emotions towards or about the

characters Aristotle thought that it was essential to tragic

drama, for instance, that the depicted course of events

should arouse fear and pity in the spectator However,

some philosophers have contended that we cannot feel

genuine emotions such as fear and pity, unless we believe

a situation to be real It is a common assumption that

fic-tion is valuable because we are able to learn in a unique

way from it, perhaps learning ‘how to feel’ certain things

How does this happen, if what we feel for fictions is not

*fictional names

C Radford, ‘How can we be Moved by the Fate of Anna

Karen-ina?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1975).

fictional names Names of fictional (including

myth-ical) characters, places, etc., such as ‘Emma Bovary’,

‘Huckleberry Finn’, ‘Dotheboys Hall’, ‘Santa Claus’,

‘Persephone’ Their use has puzzling features ‘Don Quixote’ appears to refer to a fictional character Yet surely fictional characters do not exist—otherwise they would not be fictional But how can referring to a non-existent Don Quixote differ from failing to refer to any-thing? Further, if Austen’s Mr Wickham did not exist, how can it be true—as it seems to be—that he eloped with Lydia Bennet? These puzzles have often prompted one or two responses: either fictional characters do somehow exist (but where? e.g does Sherlock Holmes really live in

London?) or typical sentences employing fictional names

(e.g ‘Maigret smoked’) are to be analysed differently from superficially similar sentences employing non-fictional names (e.g ‘Churchill smoked’) p.j.m

*referring; names; existence

D Lewis, ‘Truth in Fiction’, American Philosophical Quarterly

(1978)

fideism.Fideists hold that religious belief is based on faith rather than reason Extreme fideists maintain that it is con-trary to reason; moderate fideists argue that what must first be accepted on faith may subsequently find rational

support The maxim *credo quia absurdum est encapsulates the former view; the slogan *credo ut intelligam epitomizes

the latter There being no reason to prefer one absurdity

to another, the commitments of extreme fideists are

T Penelhum, God and Skepticism: A Study in Skepticism and Fideism

(Dordrecht, 1983)

Field, Hartry H (1946– ) American philosopher of lan-guage and *mathematics Primarily influential through his fictionalist philosophy of mathematics—the Field pro-gramme Quine and Putnam argue that since mathemat-ics is indispensable in the formulation of scientific theories, any evidence for the truth of a scientific theory is equally evidence for the truth of the mathematical theory which is its essential part Field’s programme aims to undercut this argument in two steps First, he claims that any scientific theory can be nominalistically rewritten, that is, formulated free from commitment to mathemat-ical entities Second, he aims to account for the evident usefulness of mathematical formulations of scientific the-ories by arguing that the mathematical formulations are advantageous because they lead to shorter proofs of nominalistic conclusions, but that those conclusions could be reached more long-windedly from nominalistic

H H Field, Realism, Mathematics and Modality (Oxford, 1989).

—— Science without Numbers (Oxford, 1980).

—— Truth and the Absence of Fact (Oxford, 2001).

field theory.The postulation of fields—regions under the influence of some force—allows the explanation of instant-aneous interaction between spatially separated bodies (such as magnetic attraction or repulsion) without requir-ing *action at a distance In modern physics, quantum field

field theory 301

theory is arguably required in order to reconcile

non-relativized *quantum mechanics with *Einstein’s special

relativity, and it is widely hoped that some version of this

theory might provide a ‘grand unified theory’ or ‘theory of

everything’ in which the four fundamental forces (gravity,

electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear

forces) are shown to be manifestations of a single field

However, despite success in providing a unified

explan-ation of the latter three forces, quantum field theory has

yet to give a satisfactory account of gravity, and thereby

remains inconsistent with general relativity, with some

suggesting that a radically new physical theory will be

needed Field theory has also generated debate about

whether the fundamental ontology of the world is one of

fields, rather than individuable, localizable *particles

s.r.a

*Bell’s theorem; Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen

para-dox; energy; identity of indiscernibles; individuation;

quantum theory and philosophy

Marc Lange, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Physics: Locality,

Fields, Energy and Mass (Oxford, 2002).

Paul Teller, An Interpretative Introduction to Quantum Field Theory

(Princeton, 1995)

figures of the syllogism: see syllogism.

film, philosophy of Analytic philosophers have written

infrequently on the aesthetics of the film though there are

some recent signs of increasing interest It is the question

of what is distinctive about the film, what is its essence,

that has preoccupied most philosophers A film is

photo-graphic and photographs are of reality or nature, as Cavell

puts it Scruton defines film as photographed dramatic

representation It is the fact that a photograph captures

reality which makes film, like photography, unique in the

way its creativity is somewhat displaced It is then an easy

move to the proposal that the use of some specific device

such as montage is what is essential about film but, in

truth, there is no single technique the exploitation of

which typifies the major achievements in film, from

Citi-zen Kane to Heimat Far more than photography, film has

followed traditions of its own making and its debts to

painting or architecture are no greater than the influence

of drama on opera or on *fiction or film’s own influence

on the novel The question of realism has haunted

philo-sophical writing on film in other ways; is the audience

under an illusion that the events on the screen are real and

present? Does a member of the audience assume the

pos-ition of the camera? Does he or she identify with the eye of

*poetry

Noel Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory

(Princeton, NJ, 1988)

—— The Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford, 1998).

Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the

Ontology of the Film, enlarged edn (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).

V F Perkins, Film as Film (Harmondsworth, 1972).

Roger Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding (London, 1983).

Filmer, Robert (1588–1653) English political philosopher who defended the divine right of kings Sir Robert Filmer was an English landowner who wrote a number of Royal-ist pamphlets These were not noticed in his lifetime But

after his death his best-known work, Patriarcha; or, The Natural Power of Kings, was published in 1680 The book is

an attack on what Filmer saw as the two enemies of Royal power, the Jesuits and the Calvinists, and it stated two royalist principles: divine right and the duty of passive obedience Filmer tried to show that the king’s power is derived from the natural authority of parents In other words, Adam was the first king John Locke and others attacked the absurdity of this view Unfortunately this side

of Filmer’s writings has obscured the fact that (borrowing from Hobbes) he launched a plausible attack on concep-tions such as contract and consent as explanaconcep-tions of

Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha, ed with intro and notes by Peter

Laslett (Oxford, 1949)

final causes One of Aristotle’s ‘four causes’, the final cause is ‘that for the sake of which’, or the end or goal

(Latin finis; Greek telos; hence *‘teleological explanation’).

To explain by citing a final cause is to explain something by reference to a goal that it serves Aristotle invoked final causes throughout his scientific works, including many cases that appear not to involve genuine purpose (as when webbed feet are said to be for swimming) An emphasis on teleological explanation (shared by Plato) characterizes most subsequent Western philosophy of science until the seventeenth century Whether final-cause explanations are legitimate where no agency is involved, and whether they can ever be fundamental explanations, are regarded as controversial issues by some philosophers p.j.m

*causality

J L Ackrill, Aristotle the Philosopher (Oxford, 1981), ch 4.

Fine, Kit(1946– ) Logician, metaphysician, and philoso-pher of mathematics, known for his contributions to modal logic and the metaphysics of *essence Since the revival of essentialism in the 1970s through the work of

*Saul Kripke in modal logic, it has been widely assumed that the concept of essence is to be explained through the concept of metaphysical *necessity, which is in turn to be explicated in terms of the concept of truth in every *pos-sible world Fine has argued that the proper direction of explanation is quite the reverse of this To talk of some-thing’s essence is to talk of its very nature or identity Thus, water is essentially H2O, because it is in the very nature of any chemical compound to be composed in the way that it is This is why it is metaphysically necessary that water is H2O In the philosophy of mathematics, Fine has developed a general theory of abstraction which pro-vides a foundation for number theory and analysis e.j.l

K Fine, ‘Essence and Modality’, in Philosophical Perspectives, vol.

8, ed J Tomberlin (Atascadero, Calif., 1994)

—— The Limits of Abstraction (Oxford, 2002).

302 field theory

fingering slave

Physician art thou?—one, all eyes,

Philosopher!—a fingering slave,

One that would peep and botanize

Upon his mother’s grave?

(William Wordsworth, ‘A Poet’s

Epitaph’ (1800), lines 17–20) Wordsworth’s distaste for the philosopher is at least not

exclusive, but meted out to the representatives of other

professions—statesman, lawyer, soldier, doctor,

moral-ist—whom he imagines approaching an anonymous

grave at which he meditates In fact a philosopher is not

among them, but ‘philosopher’ is an exclamation against

the allegedly philosopher-like doctor abhorred for an

objectivity which denigrates its human objects For

Wordsworth, it seems, the essence of the philosopher, like

that of the moralist for whom he reserves his greatest

con-tempt, is cerebral detachment, a lack of the emotionality

he so prized Perhaps had he been writing today he would

have used a word that is not attested till 1840—‘scientist’

j.o’g

Finnis, John (1940– ) Legal philosophy has been

influ-enced by his assault on standard oppositions between

*natural law and *legal positivism

Oxford jurisprudence tutor from 1967, Professor of

Law and Legal Philosophy in Oxford University from

1989, his doctoral thesis on the idea of judicial power was

supervised by H L A Hart, who commissioned Natural

Law and Natural Rights (1980) for the Clarendon Law

Series Social theory cannot be value-free, it argues, and

Humean ethics, unlike genuine (not neo-scholastic)

Thomist ethics, commits a naturalistic fallacy Finnis

bases his radically rearticulated Aristotelian political and

legal theory on dialectically defended first principles of

practical reason and methodological principles of practical

reasonableness (morality) Subsequently he has published

Fundamentals of Ethics (1983); Nuclear Deterrence, Morality

and Realism (1987; co-authors include Germain Grisez, on

whose philosophical work Finnis openly builds); Moral

Absolutes (1991); and Aquinas (1998). r.p.g

*law, philosophy of

Finnish philosophy Philosophy has played an important

role in the scholarly and cultural life of Finland Most of

the actual philosophical work has, nevertheless, been

done in an academic setting—when the University of

Helsinki (originally located in Turku) was founded in

1640, philosophy merited two chairs out of eleven

For a long time, Finnish academic philosophy was little

more than a succession of international trends arriving in

Finland one after the other, such as neo-Aristotelianism,

Cartesianism, Wolffianism, Kantian philosophy, and

Hegelianism However, a unique twist was given to it by

Johann Wilhelm Snellman (1805–81), who was not only

the most important statesman in the history of the

coun-try, but an independent, forceful philosopher in the

Hegelian tradition Partly because of Snellman’s impact as

an ideologue and statesman, there has ever since been a keener awareness of the public role and general signifi-cance of philosophy in Finland than in almost any other country Even recently, the main impact of some profes-sional Finnish philosophers has been on the general cul-tural and ideological discussion in the country Oiva Ketonen (1913–2000) was a distinguished case in point Some philosophers have become public figures, not to say cult figures, most recently Esa Saarinen (1953– ), alias

‘Dr Punk’ of the popular Press

Hegelianism did not for very long remain a live force in professional philosophy itself The main reaction came from a group of young radicals inspired largely by Dar-winian ideas This group included the first Finnish philosophers to have a significant international impact, Edvard Westermarck (1862–1939) in moral philosophy and social anthropology, and Yrjö Him (1870–1952) in aes-thetics Though antiquated, Westermarck’s monumental

studies The History of Human Marriage (1891) and The Ori-gin and Development of Moral Ideas (1906–8) are classics in their fields, and his Ethical Relativity (1932) was a widely

noted contribution to international discussion

The contemporary philosophical scene in Finland has not been moulded by Westermarckian neo-Darwinism, however, but by a local version of *analytic philosophy, originally inspired largely by Eino Kaila (1890–1958) The label ‘analytic’ is, nevertheless, both accurate and inaccu-rate as applied to Kaila It is historically accuinaccu-rate in that Kaila befriended the Logical Positivists and for a while par-ticipated in the discussions of the *Vienna Circle It is psycho-logically inaccurate in that Kaila’s ultimate stance was that of an old-fashioned philosopher of nature who tried to integrate the insights of contemporary physics, biology, and psychology into a grand philosophical synthesis

By and large, the best work of subsequent Finnish philosophers has been in the analytic tradition The philosophers influenced or inspired by Kaila include most notably G H von Wright (1916–2003) and Erik Stenius (1922–90) Stenius’s early work was in logic and founda-tions of mathematics Later he published an excellent

book on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and a large number of

articles known for their critical edge Among Stenius’s former students the best known is Ingmar Pörn (1935– ) Von Wright’s early work was on the problem of *induc-tion He was a friend, later a trustee and a successor, of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and did a lot to bring about Wittgenstein’s impact on contemporary philosophy His own work was not overtly in the Wittgensteinian trad-ition, however, and included important contributions to modal logic, especially deontic logic, action theory, the problems of explanation and understanding, and ethics Von Wright was also a most influential, widely respected public figure in Finland

One of von Wright’s former students is Jaakko Hintikka (1929– ), who has also been active outside of Finland, mostly in the United States Several of Finland’s most active philosophers are Hintikka’s former students or

Finnish philosophy 303

associates The work of these philosophers and their

con-temporaries covers most of the field of analytic

philoso-phy, especially philosophy of science, and amounts to a

vigorous and extensive contribution to the international

discussion in this area Unlike many other analytic

philosophers, the Finns have consistently maintained a

strong interest also in the history of philosophy k.j.j.h

*Darwinianism

Radu J Bogdan (ed.), Jaakko Hintikka, Profiles, viii (Dordrecht,

1987)

Iikka Niiniluoto, ‘After Twenty Years: Philosophy of Science in

Finland 1970–1990’, Journal for General Philosophy of Science

(1993)

—— et al (eds.), Eino Kaila and Logical Empiricism, Acta

Philo-sophica Fennica, lii (Helsinki, 1992)

P A Schilpp and L E Hahn (eds.), The Philosophy of Georg Henrik

von Wright, Library of Living Philosophers, xix (La Salle, Ill.,

1989)

Timothy Stroup (ed.), Edward Westermarck: Essays on his Life and

Works, Acta Philosophica Fennica, xxxiv (Helsinki, 1982).

fire:see Bachelard.

first cause argument This argument for God’s existence

assumes that each natural thing’s existence is caused by

something other than itself It argues there cannot be an

infinite series of such causes and concludes there is a first

cause of existence whose existence is not caused by

some-thing other than itself Further argument is needed to show

there is only one such cause and it has such traditional divine

attributes as perfect goodness p.l.q

*God, arguments against existence; God, arguments

for existence; prime mover

W L Craig, The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz (New

York, 1980)

first-person perspective: see dualism.

five ways Aquinas’s five ways of proving God’s existence

are based on the necessity of positing (1) a first changer in

various observable series of changes; (2) a first efficient

cause in various observable causal set-ups; (3) an

absolutely necessary being, given the existence of

contin-gent beings; (4) a maximum item to ground certain

com-paratives in particular goodness; and (5) ‘some intelligent

being by whom all natural things are directed’ j.j.m

*God, arguments against existence; God, arguments

for existence

A Kenny, The Five Ways (London, 1969).

flaccid designator A term designating different objects

in different *possible worlds More precisely, a singular

term that would designate different objects if certain

cir-cumstances other than its meaning were different A

*def-inite description like ‘the thirty-fifth President of the

United States’ is a flaccid designator The term actually

designates John F Kennedy But if Richard Nixon had

won the 1960 election, Nixon would have been the

thirty-fifth President In that case, ‘the thirty-thirty-fifth President’ would have designated Nixon Hence ‘The thirty-fifth President might not have been the thirty-fifth President’ is true on one interpretation Flaccid designators are opposed to *rigid designators, which designate the same object in all possible cases A proper *name like ‘John F Kennedy’ is rigid Even if Nixon had won the 1960 elec-tion, for example, ‘John F Kennedy’ would have desig-nated John F Kennedy ‘Kennedy might not have been Kennedy’ is unequivocally nonsensical w.a.d

Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass., 1980).

flesh:see Merleau-Ponty.

flow of the wind: see Korean philosophy.

flux.Everything is in flux according to Heraclitus, who is reputed to have said that ‘everything flows’, and that ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’ The idea, in Plato’s interpretation, was that the world consists entirely of per-ceived items each one of which is relative to the perceiver and time of perception with no place for a stable, objective reality Plato and Aristotle exposed fatal weaknesses in the

*process

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

focal meaning Aristotle’s account of the *meanings of grammatically different variations of the same word—

‘health’, ‘healthy’, and ‘healthful’, for example—which say different but systematically related things about items

of different sorts Foods and exercises are called healthful because of their connection with health, while organisms are called healthy if they possess health On Aristotle’s account, the words ‘healthy’ and ‘healthful’ derive their meanings from what constitutes health, and thus from the meaning of the term ‘health’ G E L Owen coined the term ‘focal meaning’ for this account because it treats the meaning of one member of a family of grammatical variants as the focus toward which explanations of the meanings of the others converge j.b.b

G E L Owen, Logic, Science, and Dialectic: Collected Papers in Greek Philosophy, ed M Nussbaum (London, 1986), 184 ff.

Fodor, Jerry A (1935– ) American philosopher who has been one of the leading figures in the recent attempt to unify the philosophy of mind with *cognitive science Against the background of his early influences—Putnam’s

*functionalism and Chomsky’s innatism—Fodor has defended an influential conception of the mind, according

to which there are laws of *folk psychology which are underpinned by the computational structure of mental processes Central to his theory is his bold hypothesis that

we think in a *‘language of thought’: a computational sys-tem of symbols, realized in the neural structure of the brain, with semantic and syntactic properties The nub of the language-of-thought hypothesis is that thinking has a

304 Finnish philosophy

causal structure that mirrors the logical structure of trains

of thought More recently, Fodor has been preoccupied

with providing a naturalistic account of the semantics of

the sentences of the language of thought t.c

Jerry A Fodor, Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the

Phil-osophy of Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).

—— Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (Oxford,

1998)

Fogelin, Robert J (1932– ) American philosopher who

taught at Yale University before moving to Dartmouth

College As his collection Philosophical Interpretations

(1992) shows, he has worked extensively in the history of

philosophy, his work insisting on taking seriously authors’

own views of the meaning and importance of their

writ-ings His books reflect his major interests in Wittgenstein

(1976) and Hume’s Skepticism in the Treatise of Human

Nature (1985) The latter has contributed to reversing a

tendency to play down Hume’s avowed scepticism But

Fogelin has also written in the area of informal logic and

the philosophy of language: his first published book was

concerned with meaning and verification, and Figuratively

Speaking (1988) is an elegant examination of *metaphor

and other kinds of non-literal discourse c.j.h

folk psychology The subject-matter of people’s

every-day understanding of one another in psychological, or

mental, terms; contrasted with scientific, or experimental,

psychology

In recent philosophy, it is sometimes supposed that the

basis of our ability to explain and predict what other

people will do, using terms like ‘believes’ and ‘desires’, is a

*theory which we know implicitly, acquired as we came to

gain psychological understanding The question can be

raised how this theory, named folk psychology, relates to

others—in the first instance how it relates to scientific

psychology, and then how it relates to neuroscientific

the-ories of brains’ workings Traditional questions about the

relation between mind and body come to be recast as

questions about relations between different theories; and

*eliminativism can be stated as the doctrine that folk

psychology is a false theory

Folk psychology may be denied the status of theory

Questions can still be raised about its relations to other

subject-matters; but these will not now be questions

about intertheoretic relations j.horn

M Davies and T Stone (eds.), Folk Psychology (Oxford, 1995).

John D Greenwood (ed.), The Future of Folk Psychology

(Cam-bridge, 1991)

Føllesdal, Dagfinn (1932– ) Norwegian philosopher,

interpreter of Husserl to analytic philosophers Føllesdal

was educated mainly at the University of Oslo and at

Har-vard University, where he taught from 1961 to 1964 He is

a professor at the University of Oslo (1967– ) and at

Stan-ford University (1968– )

In the philosophy of language, Føllesdal emphasized

the need of ‘genuine singular terms’ before Kripke, who

renamed them *‘rigid designators’ Føllesdal has also dis-cussed the normative element in reference and the rea-sons for the *indeterminacy of translation in the social nature of language

Føllesdal has put forward influential interpretations of Husserl’s philosophy, which he considers as a generalized meaning theory For instance, Husserlian noema is a gen-eralization of meaning to the realm of acts Føllesdal does not consider Husserl as a foundationalist but claims that for Husserl ultimate justification is like Rawls’s

Dagfinn Føllesdal, ‘Husserl’s Notion of Noema’, Journal of

Philosophy (1969).

Foot, Philippa R (1920– ) Best known for her work in moral philosophy, Professor Foot wrote two highly influ-ential articles in the 1950s arguing against *prescriptivism, the analysis of ethical belief and judgement propounded

by R M Hare In these papers (‘Moral Arguments’ (1958),

‘Moral Beliefs’ (1958) ), she argues that moral beliefs must concern traits and behaviour that are demonstrably bene-ficial or harmful to humans, and that what shall be regarded as beneficial or harmful is not a matter for human decision Moral beliefs cannot, therefore, be dependent on human decision For the better part of a decade, the controversy between her brand of naturalistic ethics and Hare’s views was at the forefront of Anglo-Saxon moral philosophy More recently her work has been concentrated on *virtue theory and on the limits of utilitarianism For many years a Fellow of Somerville Col-lege, Oxford, she has also held many posts in America Many of her best-known articles are collected in Philippa

Foot, Virtues and Vices (Oxford, 1978). n.j.h.d

*conscience; fact–value distinction

P R Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford, 2001).

footnotes to Plato A N Whitehead once wrote that ‘the safest general characterization’ of Western thought is that

‘it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato’ This testy assessment of an entire tradition is often recited by Pla-tonists and has earned for Whitehead the accolades of the aphorism crowd

The great thinkers of the past certainly did not think that they were adding footnotes to Plato’s text Had Kant thought he was adding one, he would surely have kept the

Critique of Pure Reason under 500 pages And should

Wittgenstein have suspected that he was producing scholia, he would have spent at least a little time reading the text

Interestingly, those who say that all subsequent thought is a footnote to Plato or to ancient sages also com-plain of wholesale and lamentable modern innovations Aside from the inconsistency, this raises the question what counts as a footnote Does Descartes, who subverted the starting-point of ancient philosophy, constitute no more than an afterthought to it? Should Hume, who rejected both its premisses and its conclusions in favour of his own

footnotes to Plato 305

original views, get no credit beyond having discovered a

new wrinkle on wisdom’s old face? Can we even think that

in his stunning synthesis of everything ancient and

mod-ern, Hegel rehearsed only what Plato had always known?

To be sure, sometimes those who wish to write

foot-notes to Plato manage to establish only a feeble

connec-tion with the original text But this does not imply that

philosophical works taking little or no account of anything

Plato said are oblique or unsuccessful commentaries on

his thought Supposing that they are makes it impossible

to appreciate their novelty and difficult to see their point

It amounts, moreover, to an affront to the integrity of

philosophers and a cynical assessment of the significance

of their field

Possibly, however, Whitehead’s statement was made

in the spirit of rampageous over-generalization one can

expect from footnoters to Plato If so, it must be taken

with a grain of salt or greeted by rolling one’s eyes But

even then, in one clear respect, the claim he makes is false

For the safest way to deal with the history of Western

thought is not to characterize it in general terms at all

j.lac

*philosophy; ancient philosophy; Platonism

René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in The

Philosoph-ical Works of Descartes (Cambridge, 1967).

G W F Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford, 1977).

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford, 1958).

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London, 1953).

A E Taylor, Plato: The Man and his Work (London, 1937).

A N Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York, 1978).

foreknowledge:see prediction.

forgery.In art, forgery can mean imitating someone’s

style, or passing an exact duplicate off as a specific work

The latter raises questions about the nature of artworks A

duplicate painting would be a distinct work from the

ori-ginal But if I write down exactly the notes that make up

the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, have I not simply copied it out

again? If my indistinguishable copy were played to an

unsuspecting audience instead of Beethoven’s, would

they be hearing a forgery? Some would argue that an

intentional duplicate of a sonata or novel does not succeed

in being a distinct work at all On the other hand, there are

strong arguments for saying that historical context and

authorial intentions determine the identity of a work—in

which case, my piece and Beethoven’s might be distinct

*lying; plagiarism

N Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, 1968), ch 3.

forgiveness.To forgive someone is to hold him or her

excused from an offence, even in one’s thoughts, while

still acknowledging his or her *responsibility for the

offence It is, perhaps, only appropriately granted by those

affected by the offence Unlike the granting of a pardon,

which may be merely a permitting to go unpunished, the

act of forgiveness involves a refusal to blame However,

the relationship of forgiveness to both contrition and

*punishment is imprecise: the possibility of forgiveness appears to make remorse possible and prevents *desert being a sufficient condition of the latter Though an essen-tial element of all personal relationships, the importance

of forgiveness is not much reflected in contemporary

*revenge

J G Murphy and J Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge,

1988)

for-itself and in-itself The distinction drawn by Sartre between the mode of being of *consciousness (‘being for-itself ’) and that of other things (‘being in-for-itself ’) This is not a dualism of substances, since Sartre holds that con-sciousness is not a substance: it is the view that there are two kinds of truth But it remains problematic: Sartre’s being in-itself is as inaccessible as Kant’s *thing-in-itself, and being for-itself relies on a questionable conception of

J.-P Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr H Barnes (London, 1958),

intro

fork, Hume’s Term applied today to Hume’s distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact Relations of ideas—like the proposition that ‘three times five is half

of thirty’—are ‘discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere exist-ent in the universe’ Matters of fact—like the proposition that ‘the sun will rise tomorrow’—cannot be demon-strated by thought alone, and are contingent, in that their negation is conceivable Hume’s distinction includes elem-ents of the three current distinctions between necessary and *contingent, *a priori and a posteriori, and *analytic and synthetic—and he seems to presume that the three distinctions coincide This supposition has been chal-lenged in various ways: it leaves no place for the synthetic

a priori, which Kant placed at the centre of metaphysics, nor for contingent a priori and necessary a posteriori propositions, of which Kripke has recently proposed examples

The term has also been applied to Hume’s related dis-tinction between ‘demonstrative’ argument (such as deduction) and ‘probable’ (or causal) reasoning Hume uses the dichotomy repeatedly to pose a dilemma for rationalists If reason tells us, say, that the future

resem-bles the past, then it must be by demonstrative arguments

or probable But demonstrative arguments cannot prove

the uniformity of nature—since non-uniformity is con-ceivable And probable arguments cannot prove it either—since probable arguments themselves presuppose the uniformity of nature, hence it would be circular to employ them in support of that uniformity For another use, see the entry ‘reason as slave of the passions’

Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding ends

with a dramatic employment of the fork, beloved of Logical Positivists in the 1930s for making havoc with false

306 footnotes to Plato

metaphysics ‘If we take in our hand any volume; of

divin-ity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it

contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?

No Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning

matter of fact and existence? No Commit it then to the

flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and

*Logical Positivism; verification principle

David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, pt iii,

sect 4 and 12

Antony Flew, Hume’s Philosophy of Belief (London, 1961), ch 3.

form, logical The logical form of a sentence—or of the

*proposition expressed by the sentence—is a structure

assigned to the sentence in order to explain how the

sen-tence can be used in logical arguments, or how the

mean-ing of the sentence is built up from the meanmean-ings of its

component parts A translation of a sentence into logical

notation is sometimes called its ‘logical form’ Views differ

on the reality and uniqueness of logical forms, and

whether they are in some way prior to the sentences

which have them Analytic philosophers have seen it as a

goal of philosophy to uncover the logical forms of

propos-itions Chomsky and other linguists have argued that a

*grammar of a natural language should show how to

ascribe logical forms to sentences w.a.h

G Preyer and G Peter (eds.), Logical Form and Language (Oxford,

2002)

formal and material mode Influenced by developments

in foundations of mathematics, Carnap elaborated on the

claim that formal features of a language (L) are clearly

dis-tinguishable from semantical features Formal features of

L are given by its syntax, which includes a sorted

vocabu-lary, formation rules for *well-formed formulae, as well

as transformation rules for deriving sentences from

sentences

Genuine object sentences of an interpreted language L

are not translatable into syntactical sentences about L It is

claimed, however, that there are sentences which seem to

be genuine object sentences (characterized as

pseudo-object sentences) but which are translatable into sentences

about L’s syntax The former are said to be in the material

mode, the latter are said to be in the formal mode

Material mode sentences are often unproblematic

However, some are seen as generating confusions

resolv-able by translation into the formal mode Examples

adapted from Carnap are the two sentences:

5 and 3 + 2 are the same

5 and 3 + 2 are equal but not the same

in the material mode, which are, in the language of

arith-metic, both translatable into the single formal mode

sentence:

The expressions ‘5’ and ‘3 + 2’ are interchangeable

*salva veritate.

The words ‘formal’ and ‘material’ were first applied to the distinction in the Middle Ages, but the other way round

r.b.m

R Carnap, Logical Syntax of Language (London, 1937).

formalism.A number of philosophical views concerning mathematics go by this name They all seem to focus on the extent to which mathematical proof can be construed

or modelled as the following of mechanical rules on sequences of typographic characters The formulae may

as well be meaningless, as far as the philosophies are con-cerned One aim is to provide a tractable epistemology for mathematics while avoiding commitment to a presum-ably dubious ontology

Opponents of formalism claim that mathematics is inherently informal and perhaps even non-mechanical Mathematical language has meaning and it is a gross distortion to attempt to ignore this At best, formalism focuses on a small aspect of mathematics, deliberately leaving aside what is essential to the enterprise

One version of formalism, which might be called ‘game formalism’, holds that the essence of mathematics is the following of meaningless rules Mathematics is likened to the play of a game like chess, where characters written on paper play the role of pieces to be moved All that matters

is that the rules have been followed correctly

Many formalist programmes are connected to develop-ments in mathematical logic earlier this century (*Logic, history of.) Formal languages and deductive systems were formulated with mathematical rigour, and the systems themselves became objects of mathematical study Such

efforts became known as metamathematics Presumably,

the essence of metamathematics goes beyond the mere following of meaningless rules Its goal is to shed light on

a subject-matter, namely formal languages and deductive systems Thus, a game formalist would either demur at this point, or else hold that metamathematics is not math-ematics—an oxymoron at best But not all formalists are game-formalists

David Hilbert and his followers held that the only meaningful, or ‘contentful’, parts of mathematics consist

of finitary assertions about finitary objects, like natural numbers This includes particular statements like ‘234 +

123 = 357’ and generalizations like ‘a + b = b + a’, made

with free variables It does not include statements, like ‘for

every n there is a p greater than n, such that p and p + 2 are

both prime’, that contain bound variables ranging over an infinite domain The infinitary, or ‘ideal’, parts of math-ematics, including analysis and set theory, have value only

in the role of facilitating the production of finitary, con-tentful statements In each case, we need to be assured that the use of ideal mathematics does not yield anything incorrect about the finitary part (*Instrumentalism.) The Hilbert programme called for each branch of mathematics

to be formalized and for the formalisms to be studied metamathematically Noting that the subject-matter of metamathematics—sequences of characters—is finitary, Hilbert declared that metamathematics be conducted

formalism 307

with only finitary means Then, once the consistency

of a formal deductive system is established, the system

can confidently be used to produce finitary results

(*Consistency proofs.)

The ensuing metamathematical research culminated

with Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, which dealt a

seri-ous blow to the Hilbert programme In particular, the

‘second’ theorem is that if Peano arithmetic is consistent,

then its own consistency cannot be established by

methods codified in that system, let alone in a finitary

fragment The same goes for classical analysis, set theory,

and virtually any other sufficiently rich formal system

If the theory is consistent, its consistency cannot be

estab-lished in the system itself

Another formalist philosophy of mathematics was

pre-sented by Haskell Curry The programme depends on a

historical thesis that as a branch of mathematics develops,

it becomes more and more rigorous in its methodology,

the end-result being the codification of the branch in

for-mal deductive systems Curry claimed that assertions of a

mature mathematical theory should be construed not so

much as the results of moves in a particular formal

deduct-ive system (as a game-formalist might say), but rather as

assertions about a formal system An assertion at the end of

a research paper would be interpreted in the form: ‘Such

and such is a theorem in this formal system.’ For Curry,

then, mathematics is an objective science, and it has a

sub-ject matter—formal systems In effect, mathematics is

metamathematics Constructively established results in

metamathematics count as legitimate mathematics

(*Constructivism.) Non-constructive results in

meta-mathematics, like most of model theory, are

accommo-dated by producing a formal system for

metamath-ematics, and construing the results in question as

*mathematics, problems of the philosophy of;

math-ematics, history of the philosophy of

Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam (eds.), Philosophy of

Math-ematics, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1983).

Haskell Curry, Outlines of a Formalist Philosophy of Mathematics

(Amsterdam, 1951)

Michael Detlefsen, Hilbert’s Program (Dordrecht, 1986).

Michael Resnik, Frege and the Philosophy of Mathematics (Ithaca,

NY, 1980)

formalism, ethical: see ethical formalism.

formalization.To formalize something, such as an

argu-ment, is to spell it out in a formal, or perhaps semi-formal,

language, such as the *predicate calculus The purpose

may simply be to render perspicuous something that was

not so perspicuous in the original Or it may be to display

what is thought to be the *logical form of the original In

either case, certain assumptions will need to be made

about the relation of ordinary language to formal

lan-guages One strand in the ‘ordinary-language philosophy’

of the 1950s and 1960s was an attitude of suspicion

towards formalization in philosophy (apart, of course,

from philosophy of logic and maths) Some might think that the pendulum has swung rather too far back now; cer-tainly, the aim of perspicuity is often better served by a lucid vernacular than by symbols r.p.l.t

M Sainsbury, Logical Forms (Oxford, 1991).

formal language A formal language is a language two of whose features are formally specified: the linguistic sym-bols of the language and rules for joining together or con-catenating these symbols into *well-formed formulae or words which can be assigned precise meanings In stand-ard first-order logic the formal language consists of vari-ables, constants, logical connectives, function and relational symbols, parentheses, and quantifiers, together with rules for the construction of well-formed formulae Kurt Gödel discovered a method for assigning natural numbers to the well-formed formulae of standard first-order theory, and this discovery provided the basis for the proof of his famous incompleteness theorem The development of formal languages for computer programs

in the 1950s was inspired by the established formal

R Wilder, Introduction to the Foundations of Mathematics (New

York, 1952)

formal logic: see logic, formal or symbolic.

formal semantics, the philosophical relevance of.

Philosophers and logicians have developed mathemat-ically precise ways to study the relationship between a lan-guage and its subject-matter by using methods originally developed for the interpretation of formal systems in logic The extension of this framework from formal to nat-ural languages is justified by adopting Frege’s truth-conditional approach to meaning The key idea here is that since a declarative sentence can represent the world

as being a certain way, the meaning of a sentence can be given by stating the conditions the world has to meet for things to be as the sentence says they are These are *truth-conditions To give the meaning of every sentence of the language we must specify the truth-conditions of each declarative sentence, then relate non-declarative to declarative sentences Formal semantics addresses the former task, the theory of force attempts the latter

*Semantics studies the relation between language and the world, but the relationship is complicated by the fact that sentences are also inferentially related to one another For example, by sharing some of the same parts, sentences can be about the same thing, and can even contradict one another When logical connections obtain between sen-tences, the truth of one may require or preclude the truth

of others So in relating language to the world these con-nections must be preserved to ensure the right patterns amongst the truth-values assigned to whole sentences Logicians first studied these connections in the context

of formal systems: languages in which we construct proofs by applying rules of inference to formulae built up from a fixed set of rules and symbols To ensure that

308 formalism

inferences rules are valid (i.e that their transitions are

truth-preserving) we must interpret the formal language,

provide definitions for the truth of its formulae, then

dis-cover whether the inferential relations are logical

conse-quences, permitting only the derivation of truths from

truths

Interpretations, or models, of these systems are

speci-fied in terms of abstract mathematical structures First we

specify a structure, and then construct an interpretation

function by assigning elements of the structure to the

basic symbols of the language as their semantic values

The semantic values of complex expressions are then

defined inductively in terms of the values of their simpler

parts In this way, the truth-value of a formula is

deter-mined by the semantic values of its parts, the syntactic

arrangement of the formula, and relations in the structure

between those semantic values Formulae true in all

models are logical truths; truth links which hold in all

models are logical consequences.

Model-theoretic and truth-theoretic semantics provide

the two leading versions of truth-conditional semantics

for natural language Model theory maps sentences and

their parts on to configurations of elements in the domain,

or structure, of a model The mapping reveals

meaning-connections between sentences by exhibiting relations

between configurations in the domain Sentences which

share parts will have elements of their truth-conditions in

common; namely, the entity, or entities, assigned to those

expressions By this mapping we can plot relations

between sentences as represented by the patterns

amongst the objects, properties, and relations assigned to

expressions which figure in those sentences Each set of

assignments, or model, corresponds to a world in which

some of those sentences are true and others are false

The best-worked-out semantics for a fragment of

Eng-lish occurs in Richard Montague’s paper ‘The Proper

Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English’, in

which set-theoretical constructs used in specifying the

models are not restricted to domains of real entities but

include objects existing in other possible worlds and at

other times Thus possible world semantics can be carried

out model-theoretically to provide truth-conditions for

sentences not just in the actual world but in all possible

worlds

Truth theory offers another version of the

truth-conditional approach to meaning Drawing on the work

of Tarski in defining truth for formalized languages, a

truth theory aims to state the truth-conditions for every

declarative sentence of the language L by proving every

T-sentence of the form:

(T) S is true-in-L if and only if p,

where the metalanguage ‘is true-in-L’ is appended to a

sen-tence S of the object language L when and only when

cer-tain conditions p obcer-tain Proof of each instance of T

proceeds from axioms which assign references to the

sim-ple parts of the object-language sentence, together with

axioms that state the consequences for truth of combining

those expressions in sentences A truth theory for a lan-guage is a finite set of such axioms Davidson has argued that such theories can serve as theories of meaning

In the early 1980s a new paradigm, called situation semantics, was developed by Barwise and Perry It treats utterances as containing not only information about the world, as in model-theoretic semantics, but also inform-ation about speakers and their relinform-ations to the world Sen-tence-meanings are not given by truth-conditions, but defined in terms of relations between situations, the utter-ance being itself a situation which carries information used in interpreting the sentence Meaning-connections between sentences reflect the relation of one situation-type to another; e.g kissing involves touching More work

is needed, however, before this serves as a competitor to

*snow is white

J Barwise and J Perry, Situations and Attitudes (Cambridge, Mass.,

1983)

M Davies, Meaning, Quantification, Necessity (London, 1981).

R Dowty, R Wall, and S Peters, Introduction to Montague Seman-tics (Dordrecht, 1981).

G Evans and J McDowell (eds.), Truth and Meaning (Oxford,

1976)

M Platts, Ways of Meaning (London, 1979).

form and matter The complementary notions of form and *matter are wholly central to the metaphysical the-ories of Plato and Aristotle, indeed to all ancient and mod-ern metaphysical inquiry Most primitively, the matter of any item is the stuff, the material of which it is made, for example clay or iron; the form is the organization, shape, pattern given to that stuff by a craftsman, for example by a potter in making a bowl From such elementary begin-nings the most difficult and exciting metaphysical theses have evolved, such as Plato’s theory of Forms (or Ideas), where Forms were conceived of as separate existents which were, somehow, responsible for particulars being

of the kind they were Aristotle, by contrast, believed in immanent forms; the only real existents are already parcels of informed matter or enmattered form Neither

*prime matter (formless and inchoate), nor pure forms, can exist independently Debates over matter and form merge into debates over *universals; and, although not central to the current agenda of metaphysical debate, these notions are, in some fashion or another, indispensable in thinking about the world and its structure n.j.h.d

*Forms, Platonic

Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge,

1988) is useful on this topic

form of life An expression which occurs six times in Wittgenstein’s published works Much used by some

*Wittgensteinians, it has occasioned exegetical contro-versy Wittgenstein employed it to indicate the roots of language and of agreement in application of linguistic rules, in consensual, regular forms of behaviour This includes natural, species-specific action and response,

form of life 309