It also includes a lengthy appendix, however, in which Kant articulates his views on the relationship between tele-ology, thetele-ology, and morality and sketches his philosophy of histo
Trang 1Since these requirements hold for all subjects, the liking
for the beautiful may be required of everyone
The second part of the third Critique is concerned with
teleological judgement, particularly its role in biology It
also includes a lengthy appendix, however, in which Kant
articulates his views on the relationship between
tele-ology, thetele-ology, and morality and sketches his philosophy
of history, together with his views on culture and its
rela-tion to the moral development of the human race Thus,
taken as a whole, the Critique of Judgement is an extremely
rich and important, if frequently perplexing, work, which
exhibits virtually the full range of Kant’s interests as a
*Kantianism; neo-Kantianism; transcendental
deduc-tion
H E Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven, Conn.,
1983)
E Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought (New Haven, Conn., 1981).
P Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge,
1992)
O Höffe, Immanuel Kant (Albany, NY, 1994).
S Körner, Kant (Harmondsworth, 1955).
M Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge, 2001).
R C S Walker, Kant (London, 1978).
Kantian ethics Ethical theories which have their origins
in, or are constructively influenced by, the moral
philoso-phy of Kant
Kant’s outstanding contribution to moral philosophy
was to develop with great complexity the thesis that moral
judgements are expressions of practical as distinct from
theoretical reason For Kant *practical reason, or the
‘rational will’, does not derive its principles of action by
examples from the senses or from theoretical reason; it
somehow finds its principles within its own rational
nature The ability to use practical reason to generate
prin-ciples of conduct Kant calls ‘the *autonomy of the will’,
and Kant sees it as constituting the dignity of a person It is
this conception of the autonomous will which is the main
source of the several sorts of theory which might
reason-ably be called ‘Kantian ethics’
One sort of Kantian ethics is developed by those who
are influenced by Kant’s view of the nature of the
prin-ciples which are generated by the autonomous will Kant
argues that willing is truly autonomous if but only if the
principles which we will are capable of being made
uni-versal laws Such principles give rise to *‘categorical
imperatives’, or duties binding unconditionally, as distinct
from hypothetical imperatives, or commands of reason
binding in certain conditions, such as that we have desires
for certain ends Kant seems to hold that
*universalizabil-ity is both necessary and sufficient for moral rightness
This thesis has been much criticized, and those espousing
Kantian ethics, as distinct from Kant’s own position,
gen-erally argue more moderately that universalizability is
necessary but not sufficient for moral rightness This is the
position of R M Hare and the theory of *‘prescriptivism’
of which he has been the outstanding proponent The
position is ‘Kantian’ in that it makes central one version of the universalizability thesis, but it departs from Kant in important ways, such as making room for utilitarian considerations
Kant argues, as we have seen, that it is in virtue of their autonomous wills that persons have dignity or are ‘ends in themselves’ Combining this aspect of the autonomous will with the idea of universalizability, Kant arrives at the ideal of the kingdom of ends in themselves, or of people respecting each other’s universalizing wills This has been
an enormously influential idea, and its most distinguished recent exponent has been John Rawls, who accepts the core Kantian idea of mutually respecting autonomous rational wills, but adds to it ideas of his own to constitute the basis of his theory of justice
It is a nice point in many given cases when a theory is simply influenced by Kantian ethics, as distinct from being
an example of Kantian ethics An Existentialist such as Jean-Paul Sartre would not be happy with the idea that he was offering a version of Kantian ethics, but there is no doubt that he is greatly influenced by Kant In Sartre (as in Nietz-sche before him) Kant’s autonomous will, free but con-strained by its essentially rational nature, becomes the totally unconstrained will creating its own values in arbi-trarily free choice This is clearly a Kantian idea in origin but developed in a way which Kant would have repudiated
To stress that these are just a few of the many examples
of Kant’s influence on ethics is to acknowledge his
*moral philosophy, the history of; histories of moral philosophy
R M Hare, ‘Universal Prescriptivism’, in Peter Singer (ed.),
A Companion to Ethics (Oxford, 1991).
I Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, tr H J Paton as The Moral Law (London, 1953).
Onora O’Neill, ‘Kantian Ethics’ in Peter Singer (ed.), A Companion
to Ethics (Oxford, 1991).
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, 1972).
Kantianismcovers any philosophical view which derives from, or echoes, the central tenets of Kant’s critical
philoso-phy After the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason in
1781 that philosophy had an impact that was both imme-diate and enduring, and few Western philosophers have been able to escape its influence There is evidently a direct line of descent among German philosophers from Kant through Fichte and Hegel, past Schelling, Schopen-hauer, and neo-Kantians such as Hermann Cohen and Natorp, to Husserl and Heidegger These philosophers mostly incorporated part of Kant’s teaching into their own philosophies, though they rarely endorsed everything that Kant said and were often, like Hegel and Heidegger, deeply critical of Kant’s own position Nor, of course, did they all agree in their interpretations of Kant
Kant’s influence in the Anglo-Saxon world has been
more variable In the earliest days De Quincey, in Black-wood’s Magazine, took the view that Kant’s personal life
was more interesting than his philosophy—a view that
470 Kant, Immanuel
Trang 2would now be regarded as odd to the point of perversity.
Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy quotes
James Mill’s patronizing judgement ‘I see clearly enough
what poor Kant would be at’, and explicitly dissented from
the view that Kant was the greatest of modern
philoso-phers The American Pragmatists acknowledged the
influence that Kant had on them by linking their own term
*‘Pragmatism’ with what Kant had said in the
Transcen-dental Dialectic of ‘pragmatic belief ’ (Critique of Pure
Rea-son, B 852) Charles Peirce adopted a strongly Kantian
account of categories, but William James rejected what he
understood of Kant’s *‘transcendentalism’, and urged that
the right way to deal with Kant was to go round him rather
than through him And yet, despite this catalogue of
hos-tility and incomprehension, Kant has constructively
influ-enced many recent analytic philosophers from
Wittgenstein to Strawson and Putnam Nowadays few
philosophers in this tradition resist a token reference to
Kant, even though their views could not be regarded as
Kantian Davidson’s *‘anomalous monism’, for example,
was constructed in part with a conscious reference
to Kant’s treatment of the conflict between free will
and causality
Two central features of Kant’s critical philosophy serve
to define Kantianism First is the fundamental reference to
what Kant calls ‘transcendental apperception’, and
espe-cially to that aspect of it which covers personal identity
and self-consciousness Second is the reference to a
tran-scendental method which Kant conceived as a
revolution-ary way of resolving the endless conflicts in the
philosophical tradition from the Greeks to David Hume
Both aspects are complex, and ramify prolifically
through Kant’s own writing and that of his Kantian
successors Transcendental apperception, for example,
covers for Kant not only the central datum of
self-consciousness, but also the a priori network of *categories
through which an objective experience is made possible
In its purely personal aspect it defines various conceptions
of transcendental idealism, from the extreme subjectivity
of Fichte’s notion of the ‘ego’ to Strawson’s account of the
concept of a ‘person’ as primitive It has additionally a vital
link through Kant’s conception of transcendental freedom
to the notions of personal agency, responsibility, and the
moral law Most of the German philosophers influenced
by Kant, from Fichte to Husserl and Heidegger,
recog-nized some notion of the self as the hinge about which the
critical philosophy revolved Many of them, like Fichte
himself and Schopenhauer, regarded that notion as one
with a primary moral significance In more recent times,
through a simple contrast between *Utilitarianism and
Kantianism in moral philosophy, this aspect of Kant’s
view has been associated with a non-consequentialist
con-ception of the intrinsic moral character of acts
The second feature, Kant’s transcendentalism, is also
complex and variously interpreted It covers the ground
from a tacit appeal to supernatural, or supersensible,
entities which Kant called *‘noumena’ or
*‘things-in-them-selves’, to a purported new form of logic, a transcendental
logic, with a claimed revolutionary application to trad-itional philosophical issues The former context might be
further divided into a positive acceptance of such things in
themselves, especially in relation to the transcendental
self, and a negative rejection of any genuine knowledge of
such supersensible entities It was the negative aspect which led Schopenhauer to approve of Kant’s rejection of transcendent metaphysics, and the positive aspect which led James to reject a Kantian transcendent self in favour of
a modified Humean and empiricist account
But Kant’s transcendental method, and its alleged logic, are less mysterious in Kant than in some of his successors Husserl’s ‘transcendental-phenomenological reduction’, for example, sought to effect a transition from unreflect-ive common sense to the recognition of a pure conscious-ness or transcendental ego which was not accessible to empirical observation But it remains unclear how his phenomenological descriptions could yield a priori knowledge of such items Peirce took seriously Kant’s appeal to an architectonic structure for the critical system
in his own account of categories and ‘triadicity’, but it has more often seemed dubious to attach so much signifi-cance to Kant’s *architectonic Moreover, although Kant’s references to a transcendental logic as part of his distinc-tive method may seem to indicate a non-standard version
of formal logic, there seems no good reason to think of it
in that way
In fact Kant’s transcendental method appeals essen-tially to two features: first to his novel classification of
‘synthetic a priori’ judgement, and second to the concep-tion of a ‘condiconcep-tion of a possible experience’ The two fea-tures coincide naturally with the thought that any proposition which expresses a condition of any possible experience will be bound to have a special status which may be described in terms of the synthetic a priori classifi-cation On one side the conception of a condition of a pos-sible experience places a restriction on what can count as knowledge and licenses it only when it can be brought to bear upon some possible experience Although such a view is not the same as the Logical Positivists’ appeal to verifiability, nevertheless it shares with them and with Hume a tough-minded criterion with which to evaluate speculative philosophy On the other side the conception offers the prospect of a new and constructive approach to experience, in which the conditions of that experience are identified as a priori and treated as the background frame-work which makes it possible It is this aspect which con-nects so naturally with recent philosophical accounts of
*language-games (Wittgenstein), or *conceptual schemes (Strawson), categorial frameworks (Körner), or concep-tual relativity (Putnam) It is associated also with Colling-wood’s account of ‘absolute presuppositions’ and above all with Strawson’s project of ‘descriptive metaphysics’
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is often
thought to echo Kantian themes in its account of the inex-pressible limits to our experience, and especially in its ref-erences to a ‘metaphysical’ self which marks a limit to the world and is not therefore simply a part of it (5.641) But it
Kantianism 471
Trang 3is in Wittgenstein’s later works, such as Philosophical
Inves-tigations and On Certainty, that a more direct reference to
Kantianism is to be found For Wittgenstein’s ideas of a
form of life and of a language-game expressing such a form
and governed by rules which make that experience
possi-ble echo Kant’s notion of a condition of possipossi-ble
experi-ence governed by his synthetic a priori principles
Wittgenstein did not classify his rules as synthetic a priori,
but he recognized their special status by calling them
‘grammatical’ rules Although the notion of a
language-game captures the Kantian idea of a systematic experience
governed by rules, Wittgenstein’s conception, like
Körner’s account of a categorial framework, is not
designed to cover the whole of our experience, but only
some differentiable aspect of it Strawson’s account of a
conceptual scheme, too, dispensed with the synthetic a
priori classification, and so produced a Kantianism with
more of an empiricist flavour than Kant would have
accepted
Of all these recent Kantian accounts, however,
Straw-son’s has been the most committed and influential It
brings together the two aspects noted above of a
funda-mental and irreducible appeal to the notion of the self, and
a transcendental method of justifying such fundamental
notions For in Strawson the appeal to conditions of
pos-sible experience has been seen as a distinctively Kantian
response to traditional scepticism through the notion of a
transcendental argument In a similar way Putnam’s
‘internal realism’ is also a conscious attempt to follow
Kant’s appeal to a justified objectivity in experience which
does not rest on an absolutist ‘God’s-eye view’ of an
inde-pendent reality
A doubt, for example, about the feasibility of providing
an empiricist analysis of the *self in terms of a closed
sequence of sense-impressions might encourage an
alter-native non-empiricist and Kantian account If the self,
something to which such sequences of impressions
belong, is a necessary, a priori, condition of any possible
experience, then this may answer, or at least evade, such a
traditional scepticism Strawson’s Kantian account of the
self as a primitive notion, not to be itself analysed in terms
of mental or physical features, echoes such a response
And in his account of a necessary reidentification of
objects as a further condition for possible experience the
same technique is explicitly used to rebut a traditional
scepticism about *identity The central idea is that if
reidentification is a necessary condition for any possible
experience, then the sceptic’s doubt will be either
incoher-ent or else will embody a revisionary recommendation
which is at best optional The doubt will be incoherent on
one side, since without a belief in identity there is no
pos-sible experience, and hence no way of making sense of the
sceptic’s query It will be an optional revision, on the other
side, if the sceptic uses his argument to recommend a
change from the standard forms in which such
reidentifi-cation is realized in our conceptual scheme
Strawson’s appeal to ‘primitive’ features of our
experi-ence such as the concept of a person or of reidentification
provides a modest Kantianism, but there are less modest ways of understanding Kant’s own account With regard
to the self, for example, many Kantians have taken the view that for Kant such a reference is unavoidably to noumena or things-in-themselves Such a view is encour-aged by Kant’s account of the resolution of the conflict between cause and *freedom in the Third Antinomy, where it is easy to read him as accepting a ‘two-worlds’ picture of phenomenal causality and noumenal freedom His remarks on the distinction between empirical and intelligible characters in human agents have sometimes associated Kantianism with an indeterminist doctrine, in which human freedom and responsibility are safeguarded
by being exempted from natural causation Although Kant himself rejects the strategy of exempting humans from causal influence, it remains unclear whether his own resolution of the traditional debate in this context is
*neo-Kantianism
H E Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge, 1990).
Graham Bird, ‘Kant’s Transcendental Arguments’, in E Schaper
and W Vossenkuhl (eds.), Reading Kant (Oxford, 1989).
D Davidson, ‘Mental Events’, in L Foster and J W Swanson
(eds.), Experience and Theory (London, 1970).
Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed and intro James
Conant (Cambridge, Mass., 1992)
P F Strawson, Individuals (London, 1959).
Kantianism, neo-: see neo-Kantianism.
Kaplan, David B (1933– ) American philosopher at the University of California, known for his work in inten-sional logic, semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of lan-guage His initial stance was Fregean as in the influential
‘Quantifying In’, but his later work evolved into a theory
of direct *reference where, for example, expressions such
as demonstratives, indexicals, and proper names are held
to be unmediated by abstract senses
In ‘Opacity’ he addresses problems of substitution, dif-ferences between naming and describing, quantifiers, and causal theories of reference His views are further articu-lated in studies of demonstratives and *indexicals, at the centre of which is the distinction between the content of
an expression and its character Content is the referent in a given context of use Character (corresponding roughly to linguistic ‘meaning’) determines a content for any given context, as in the utterance ‘I am here’
Also influential are papers on *descriptions, and on meta-physical questions raised by modal *semantics r.b.m
J Almog et al., Themes from Kaplan (Oxford, 1989).
L Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of W V Quine (La Salle, Ill., 1986) Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8 (1979).
L Linsky (ed.), Reference and Modality (Oxford, 1979).
M Loux (ed.), The Possible and the Actual (Cornell, 1979).
karma. Literally action, whether bodily, linguistic, or mental In most classical Indian traditions, ‘karma’ can also mean the unseen potentials for future pain and
472 Kantianism
Trang 4pleasure which we accumulate as the result of good and
bad action Without exhausting these potentials there is
no release from rebirth for the soul Thus karma
consti-tutes bondage in Jaina, Buddhist, and Vedic thought The
law of karma links up the moral quality of past actions
with the hedonic quality of present and future life in a
deterministic way Ancient Indian medical and moral
philosophers retrodict the birth, life-span, and well-being
of an individual in terms of this theory A slanderer, for
example, is allegedly reborn with bad breath Thanks to
this doctrine, the Hindu theist’s God is acquitted of
responsibility for evil Buddhists or Jaina atheists take it as
a natural law needing no omniscient monitor a.c
*Buddhist philosophy; Indian philosophy; Jainism;
Veda¯nta; reincarnation
Wendy D O’Flaherty, Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian
Trad-itions (Berkeley, Calif., 1980).
Kautsky, Karl (1854–1938) The leading Marxist
theoret-ician during the two decades before the First World War,
Kautsky expressed the precarious orthodoxy of the time
He defended his view with vigour both against the
revi-sionist tendencies of Bernstein and against the more
revo-lutionary Marxism of Luxemburg and, later, of Lenin As
well as popularizing Marx’s economic and philosophical
ideas, Kautsky produced pioneering works on such
diverse subjects as the agrarian question and the origins of
Christianity He was much influenced by the ‘scientific’
*materialism of writers such as Haecher and Darwin, and
this perspective marked all his writings Even in his
pol-itics Kautsky remained evolutionary, materialist, and
*Marxist philosophy
Dick Geary, Karl Kautsky (Manchester, 1987).
Massimo Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution
1880–1938 (London, 1979).
Kelsen, Hans (1881–1973) Austrian public lawyer and
political theorist, his ‘pure theory of law’ was central to
mid-twentieth-century philosophy of law Rooted in
nine-teenth-century German *legal positivism and, later,
neo-Kantian concern with the conditions for knowing legal
norms as norms (neither mere facts nor morally
grounded), his sceptically positivist and ethically
non-cognitivist work became more Humean after his
emigration to America in 1940
Every legal system’s unity and validity derives, he
argued, from its basic norm (Grundnorm): apply sanctions
in accordance with the historically first (after the latest
revolution) constitution and norms made thereunder
Juristic thought is possible only on the hypothesis,
presup-position, or transcendental-logical postulate of the basic
norm, which in late Kelsen is the content of a fictitious act
of will and no longer has the role of resolving conflict
Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Norms, tr and intro Michael
Hartney (Oxford, 1991)
—— Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory, tr and intro B L.
and S L Paulson (Oxford, 1992)
Kenny, Anthony John Patrick (1931– ) British philoso-pher who has written on topics in the philosophy of mind, medieval philosophy, ancient philosophy, the philosophy
of Wittgenstein, the philosophy of Descartes, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of religion His output
includes over thirty books, beginning with Action, Emotion and Will, published in 1963.
Kenny was ordained a Catholic priest in 1955 but returned to the lay state in 1963 He then held various uni-versity teaching posts He has been Master of Balliol Col-lege, Oxford The philosophy of religion has remained one of his major interests and he has produced several vol-umes in which he has examined arguments for the exist-ence of God
In the area of philosophy of mind, the greatest influence
on him has been Wittgenstein, on whom Kenny has writ-ten two volumes, and his influence is also evident in his other writings on the philosophy of mind, on Descartes,
*Frege
A J P Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind (Oxford, 1992).
—— A Brief History of Western Philosophy (Oxford, 1998).
Keynes, John Maynard (1883–1946) Keynes is primarily
remembered for his economic works Treatise on Money (1930) and The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), which argued that governments should
raise taxes and lower spending during prosperity and lower taxes and increase spending during recessionary periods, and for his practical contributions to developing the international monetary system Many believe that Keynesian economics was crucial to avoiding the escalat-ing cycle of boom and bust that Marx believed would inevitably contribute to the destruction of capitalism Philosophically, Keynes is primarily remembered for his devotion to G E Moore’s moral philosophy, and
admired for his seminal A Treatise on Probability (1921),
which is one of the most important expressions of the a priori or logical theory of *probability: that probability consists fundamentally of an evidentiary relation between
B W Bateman and J B Davis (eds.), Keynes and Philosophy: Essays
on the Origin of Keynes’s Thought (Cheltenham, 1991).
R Weatherford, Philosophical Foundations of Probability Theory
(London, 1982)
Khaldu¯n:see Ibn Khaldu¯n.
Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye (1813–55) Danish writer and social critic widely credited with setting the stage and pro-viding the conceptual tools for modern *existentialism Kierkegaard was also one of Hegel’s most devastating crit-ics The formative years in Copenhagen were marked by personal dependence on an oppressively religious father and by the deaths, before he reached the age of 21, of his
Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye 473
Trang 5mother and five of the family of seven of which he was the
youngest Kierkegaard spent ten years at the university
before completing his dissertation On the Concept of Irony
with Constant Reference to Socrates (1841) preliminary to a
career in the Church His second major work Either/Or
(1843) marked a postponement of that career and was the
outcome of the fateful decision to break off an engagement
and disappointment at not finding in Schelling’s Berlin
lec-tures a philosophical alternative to established
*Hegelian-ism The work portrays two life-views, one consciously
hedonistic, the other ethical in a way which Hegelians
would recognize except that the choice of the ethical is a
personal one, not the outcome of a philosophical insight
The hedonistic or ‘aesthetic’ alternative is presented by a
gifted essayist, and member of a society called
‘compan-ions of the deathbound’, who applies it as a consistent
prin-ciple in his own life, while the ethical perspective is
conveyed in two extended admonitory letters addressed to
the hedonist by a friend, a state functionary who urges him
to admit that his situation is one of *despair so that he can
then ‘choose himself’ in ethical categories, these providing
the true fulfilment of the aesthetic values he prizes
Kierkegaard’s own intentions are concealed behind an
elaborate barrage of noms de plume (the work is published
by a pseudonymous ‘editor’ who tells how he has come
upon the papers quite by accident)
The impression given by the title that the aesthetic and
ethical life-views represent an exhaustive choice is
dis-turbed by a concluding sermon passed on to the hedonist
by the functionary on the theme that before God we are
always in the wrong Kierkegaard claimed later that at the
time he himself had despaired of finding fulfilment in
mar-riage but said that he had portrayed marmar-riage as a form of
fulfilment because it struck him as being ‘the deepest form
of revelation’ Unable to reveal himself in that way,
Kierkegaard embarked on a series of ‘edifying’ works
under his own name These works, though on the surface
in a conventionally religious vein, convey deep
moral-psychological insight and it would not be improper to
refer to them as philosophical
The practice of concealment was continued, however,
in a parallel series of pseudonymous works which include
those more usually regarded as philosophical These
include, already in 1843, two works written largely in
Berlin, Repetition and Fear and Trembling, followed in
1844 by Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of Anxiety,
and in 1845 by Stages on Life’s Way, in which a
reli-gious stage is distinguished from Either/Or’s ethical
alternative
The pseudonymous authorship was to have ended with
the publication of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to
Philosophical Fragments (1846), Kierkegaard having in mind
to resume his intention to enter the priesthood Instead,
however, he wrote further non-pseudonymous works on
specifically Christian themes motivated in part by the
thought that he was better able to serve the truth as a
writer Among them are Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing
(1847) with its account of *double-mindedness and the
formidable Works of Love (1847) But at the same time,
vir-tually ostracized by a feud he had himself provoked with a satiric weekly and which left him a figure of public ridicule, Kierkegaard’s plans for at least partial self-revelatory absorption into society had given way to an urge to reveal to society its errors The popular monarchy and people’s Church, newly established in the aftermath of
1848, and which Kierkegaard saw as merely finite institu-tions catastrophically usurping the true role of religion, provided the political target Deciding to announce that his intentions as an author had been religious all along, Kierkegaard now planned a second (unrevised) edition of
Either/Or together with an explanation (The Point of View
of my Work as an Author) of the relation of that and the
sub-sequent pseudonymous works to the Christian themes of his non-pseudonymous production For a variety of rea-sons detailed in his journals the explanation was withheld (but published posthumously by his brother in 1859), and instead Kierkegaard gave out two further works under a new pseudonym
The first of these, The Sickness unto Death (1849), fol-lowed hard upon the second edition of Either/Or It
typ-ologizes forms of despair as failures to sustain a ‘synthesis’ which expresses the structure of selfhood The work intro-duces a non-substantial but normative concept of the self
or ‘spirit’ The most common and dangerous form of despair is one which people fail to recognize in themselves and even mistake for its opposite In a spiritless society whose institutions have taken over spirit’s functions also
in name, no real basis for spirit, or true selfhood, remains
in the established forms of life Spiritual possibilities then tend to find their outlets outside such forms in madness, religious intoxication, the cult of the aesthetic, or in utopian politics This, from the individual’s perspective, is one way of failing to maintain the synthesis The other is for the individual to duck below the level of its own spir-itual possibilities and lead a spirspir-itually emasculated life of
worldliness The solution which The Sickness unto Death
prescribes for despair is faith, or willing acceptance of the task of becoming a self ‘posited’ not by itself but by a tran-scendent power
In the final pseudonymous work, Training in Christianity
(1850), Kierkegaard readdresses themes raised in the
earlier Philosophical Fragments, in particular the
individ-ual’s relation to Christ as one not of history but of con-temporaneity and of shared human degradation In the five years remaining until his early death at 42, Kierkegaard lived in increasingly straitened (though never degrading) circumstances, expending the remainder of a
considerable inheritance on an explosive broadsheet (The Instant), in which, under his own name, he savagely
sat-irized the State Church, its dignitaries, and minions According to the withheld explanation the pseudonym-ous (‘aesthetic’) works deliberately adopt an aesthetic point of view in order to loosen the grip on their readers of
a falsely ‘aesthetic’ picture of religious fulfilment They can also be read as mirroring their true author’s own struggles
as a social outsider playing with the thought that his
474 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye
Trang 6literary talents and situation might have marked him out
for a specifically religious mission In Either/Or human
ful-filment, corresponding to the second, ‘ethical’ stage in the
progression from the aesthetic to the religious, meant
choice of a self wedded in a conventionally Hegelian way
to shared social norms The subsequent pseudonymous
works, beginning with Repetition and Fear and Trembling,
present the radically anti-Hegelian idea that the ethical
component in the individual’s life is established first in a
psychologically unmasked and socially unmediated
rela-tion to God The slim but elegantly crafted Philosophical
Fragments contrasts an idealist view, identified with Plato’s
Socrates but clearly to be construed as a progenitor of
Hegel, with one where the relationship to truth depends
on faith The massive Postscript is described by Kierkegaard
as a turning-point in the ‘aesthetic’ works, since it clearly
identifies the latter view with Christianity and raises
explic-itly the question of what it means to be a Christian The
Christian’s proper relation to the ‘absolute object of
wor-ship’ is *inwardness, or a ‘passionate’ interest in a
transcen-dentally grounded fulfilment, the more passionate because
the individual is aware that no empirical or rational inquiry
can support acceptance of an assurance based exclusively
on the belief that some other existing individual has been
the eternal in time (the God-man) This is literally
unthink-able and therefore immune to argument or evidence one
way or the other The principal target is Hegel’s ‘System’,
which, by treating matters requiring personal choice as
topics for a shared rational insight, turns living issues into
matters for a generalized curiosity In fact there are two
opposed objections to a scientific approach to the question
of personal fulfilment In Hegelian science the matter is
decided already by the truth of being which will emerge as
the system of thought develops, but that abstracts from
your own existence which ‘keeps thought and being apart’
and therefore fails to capture the forward movement of the
individual’s own life And treating the issue as a scientific
matter in a general sense to be decided collaboratively in
the light of evidence not all of which is (or ever will be) in,
ignores the urgency of the Christian message which stands
there, as William James would say, as a ‘forced’ option that
brooks no delay
Some see in Kierkegaard’s philosophical pseudonym
( Johannes Climacus) an assassin hired to deal with the
Hegelians, so that the absurdity and paradox of Christianity
arise only for the misguided ‘systematizer’ Wittgensteinians
have interpreted the Postscript as a demonstration of
what happens if you apply the rules of one language-game
inappropriately to another, but this inner relativism fits ill
with Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the ‘crucifixion’ of reason
in faith In his journals Kierkegaard says that paradox and
absurdity are the negative conditions of faith—guarantees,
as it were, that the assurance sought in faith is not being
treated as though it were achievable through the exercise
of some human capacity That capacity need not be
cogni-tive; the distinction between *Religiousness A and
Reli-giousness B is between, on the one hand, a view which
interprets what the pseudonymous author calls ‘dying
from immediacy’ procedurally, as if a relationship with the object of worship can be established simply by subordinat-ing all ‘relative’ ends to an ‘absolute’ end, and on the other hand a non-immanentist view and the ‘Christian’ view in which human capacities as such extend no further than to history so that a historical event, the Incarnation, offers our only relation to the Absolute From this point of view the Absolute lies beyond the reach of any kind of natural relationship
What then is the positive content of faith? The pseud-onymous works do not say; their ‘dialectic’ is, as some have said, merely ‘negative’ But the final pseudonymous
work, Training in Christianity, can be read together with
parts of the non-pseudonymous ‘religious’ corpus as indi-cating that the saving truth can be grasped in a moral agent’s sense, in imitating the example of Christ, of acting out this truth in the form of Christian love The earlier
Works of Love presents the Christian ideal of love of one’s
neighbour in the form of a generalized selflessness Part of what emerges is that it is only by removing personal pref-erences that values inherent in other persons, but also in nature, can be truly acknowledged and allowed their ful-filment This assumes that the value or worth of persons and things is neither, as Hobbes has it, their price nor any degree of natural attachment to them Values, on this view, reside in possibilities inherent in the persons and things themselves independently of human interests, and indeed these interests stand in the way of those values both in the sense that they do not become visible and in the sense that they fail to be elicited The inner consistency
of the view as a generally applicable ethics depends at least
in part on how far the sacrifice of human desires or inter-ests is compatible with the sacrificer’s own personal or human fulfilment
Kierkegaard detects in social forms, and in patterns of human behaviour in general, a pervasive disinclination to face live issues in their appropriately living form In this respect Hegelianism is not simply a failed attempt to cap-ture the forward movement of life, but part of a general contempt for the individual, evident also in the conflation
of the truism that human life is impossible without polit-ical groupings with the pernicious idea that the individ-ual’s fulfilment can come to expression only in the form of
political association or religious community (see Literary Review: The Two Ages (1846) ) Kierkegaard’s writings are
profitably grasped in the light of his sense of a prevailing flight from *subjectivity and of society’s need to divest itself of protective self-images The more scandalous views attributed to Kierkegaard, such as the arbitrary defeasibility of shared norms, the subjectivity of truth, and the supposed foundational role assigned to criterionless choice, often vanish on a closer reading of the texts, which in context lend themselves to more readily accept-able readings Thus the notorious teleological suspension
of the ethical in Fear and Trembling can be seen as part
of Kierkegaard’s nowadays uncontroversial insistence that systems of shared social norms are purely historical phenomena set against his championing of the view
Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye 475
Trang 7that a true system of values derives directly from an
unconditioned transcendent source, unmediated by
con-tingent and merely finite facts of preference His target is
the common assumption in his time that facts of
prefer-ence are both historical and expressions of an unfolding
Absolute The claims in the Postscript for the subjectivity
of truth can be read as the requirement that the relation to
the unconditional source of value be one of inwardness
and personal devotion both to the source itself and,
through it, though distributively rather than collectively,
to mankind As for the rumour of a criterionless choice, in
Kierkegaard there is little or no evidence for this idea as
distinct from that of the notion of personal commitment
and choice At least the reader of Either/Or, the most
widely cited source for the rumour, cannot fail to detect
signs of dialogue in that work, objections to the ethical
life-view implicit in the first part which are then made
explicit and countered in the second part, which is also in
itself a sustained argument in favour of the ethical
alterna-tive Failure to choose the ethical alternative is presented
as more in the nature of a motivated rejection of a form of
human fulfilment that the hedonist is already in a position
to acknowledge but refuses so to do, than a choice made in
a vacuum between two quite independent and equally
valid ways of life
The tendency to ascribe extreme views to Kierkegaard
may be due in part to the fanatical anti-humanism of his
later rejection of all bourgeois forms of human
associ-ation, including marriage and the family Kierkegaard
himself remarks on how the original either/or becomes
radicalized so that in the end both ethics and institutional
religion (castigated as the fraud of ‘Christendom’) end up
on the aesthetic side as merely forms of self-indulgence,
while self-abnegation, suffering, and devotion to God
now form the saving option This could be seen as a
pat-tern set from the start; Lukács suggests it is the outcome of
Kierkegaard’s life-long tendency to spite reality Or
per-haps the extremity was one that Kierkegaard was driven
to by circumstances The radical stance might also,
how-ever, at a pinch be interpreted as prescribed by the
Post-script’s insistence that Religiousness A is a necessary
prolegomenon to Religiousness B The later Kierkegaard
may be insisting that the institutions of a spiritless society
must be comprehensively vacated before creative
alterna-tives based on true selfhood can replace them We note
that Kierkegaard describes The Sickness unto Death as
con-taining a polemic directed at that ‘altogether un-Christian
conception’, Christendom Regarding the establishment’s
scorn of sects, he said there was ‘infinitely more Christian
truth’ in the errors of their ways than in ‘the mawkishness,
torpor, and sloth of the establishment’ The trick is to be
rid of the errors of the pagans without losing, as in a
spirit-less society which shuns true selfhood, their ‘primitive’
spiritual impetus
For obvious reasons rationalists and, because of his
attitude to shared norms, Hegelians have dismissed
Kierkegaard as an irrationalist; while what in Kierkegaard’s
writings repels rationalists and Hegelians alike has drawn
sympathy from circles later stigmatized as fascist Equally, democrats are put off by Kierkegaard’s contempt for pub-lic opinion, the crowd, and parliamentary institutions, and although Marcuse saw ‘traits of a deep-rooted social the-ory’ in Kierkegaard, the Christian framework and the focus
on the individual make Kierkegaard an obvious target for the Marxist Eagerly read in German academic circles at the beginning of the twentieth century, and heralded by theologians as the provider of a radical Christian apolo-getic, Kierkegaard also influenced agnostic and atheist thinkers of such divergent political sympathies as Heideg-ger and Lukács The enormous extent of the former’s debt
to Kierkegaard is still to be appreciated The latter in his pre-Marxist days admired what he saw as the tragic hero-ism with which Kierkegaard, by exalting the notion of choice, vainly defied the necessities of life by seeking, first
in his own life, to impose on them a poetic form The later Lukács blamed Kierkegaard for the ‘bourgeois’ philosophy
of post-war existentialism and even saw in him a source of modern nihilism and decadence As if in confirmation of this latter charge some post-modern writers, notably Jean Baudrillard, focus on Kierkegaard the ‘aesthetic’ author and see in this complex man a pre-incarnation of the modern existentialist Adorno, sympathizing with Kierkegaard’s campaign against the tyranny of the univer-sal over the particular though not with the resort to reli-gious concepts, found in Kierkegaard’s experimental
‘aesthetic’ writings the makings of a new style of reasoning which elicits rather than buries the truth of the particular Many modern philosophers have found in the religious framework of Kierkegaard’s writings an impediment to any serious appreciation of his thought Wittgenstein, however, once referred to Kierkegaard as ‘by far the most profound thinker of the last century’ a.h
S N Dunning, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness: A Structural Analysis of the Theory of Stages (Princeton, NJ, 1985).
John W Elrod, Being and Existence in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Works (Princeton, NJ, 1975).
A Hannay, Kierkegaard (London, 1982; rev edn 1991).
Søren Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, ed P A Heiberg,
V Kuhr, and N Thulstrup, 16 vols (Copenhagen, 1909–78)
—— Søren Kierkegaards Samlede Værker, ed A B Drachmann, J L.
Heiberg, and H O Lange, 20 vols (Copenhagen, 1961–4)
—— Kierkegaard’s Writings, ed H V and E H Hong et al.,
26 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1978– )
—— Fear and Trembling, Eng tr (Harmondsworth, 1985).
—— The Sickness unto Death, Eng tr (Harmondsworth, 1989).
—— Either/Or, Eng tr., abridged (Harmondsworth, 1992).
B Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark (Bloomington,
Ind., 1990)
G Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious (London,
1991)
M C Taylor, Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self (Princeton, NJ, 1975).
killing.Presumably no society could survive unless it had some restrictions on its members killing each other But the prohibitions that societies have on killing vary greatly
In Greek and Roman times to be a human—that is, a
member of the species Homo sapiens—was not sufficient to
476 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye
Trang 8guarantee that one’s life would be protected Slaves or
other ‘barbarians’ could be killed, under conditions that
varied from time to time; and deformed infants were
exposed to the elements on a hilltop The coming of
Chris-tianity brought a new insistence on the wrongness of
killing all born of human parents, in part because all
humans were seen as having an immortal soul, and in part
because to kill a human being is to usurp God’s right to
decide when we shall live and when we shall die
Non-human animals, on the other hand, remained unprotected
because they were believed to have been placed by God
under man’s dominion This doctrine of the sanctity of all
(and only) human life remains the orthodox view on the
morality of killing
Some contemporary philosophers, among them
Jonathan Glover, James Rachels, and Peter Singer, have
challenged this orthodoxy, arguing that membership of a
given species—for example, Homo sapiens—cannot in
itself determine the value of a being’s life, or the
wrong-ness of killing that being Rather, this wrongwrong-ness must
depend on some morally relevant characteristics that the
being has Sentience, or the capacity to feel pleasure or
pain, seems to be a minimal characteristic, and so the
killing of plants is not wrong in itself In addition to
sen-tience, however, Glover gives an important place to the
being’s capacity for *autonomy, for making his or her own
decisions (including a decision about whether or not to
continue living) Killing an autonomous being against that
being’s will is the most drastic possible violation of
auton-omy, and this makes it more seriously wrong than the
killing of a sentient being not capable of autonomy
Rachels focuses on whether the being can live a
bio-graphical, rather than a merely biological, life, which is
sim-ilar to the emphasis given by Singer to the ability to see
oneself as having a past and a future To kill such a being,
unless at the being’s request, thwarts the preferences for
the future that the being may have, and this makes the
killing wrong in a way that is additional to any wrong that
may be incurred by the killing of a sentient being unable to
form any preferences for the future
The effect of these arguments is to distinguish a class of
beings whom it is especially wrong to kill The term
‘per-son’ is often used to distinguish this class from the class of
human beings as a whole, for not all human beings are
autonomous, or capable of seeing themselves as having a
past and a future Infants, and the profoundly
intellec-tually disabled, for example, are not Chimpanzees, on the
other hand, appear to be persons in this sense Hence it is
an implication of this view that, other things being equal,
it is worse to kill a normal chimpanzee than a profoundly
intellectually disabled human being Of course, to arrive
at a final judgement about the wrongness of killing any
being, we need to consider also the effect of the killing on
relatives and friends, and on the community as a whole
The *slippery slope argument is often used as an
objec-tion to any change in our attitude to killing human beings
We should, however, be equally aware of the possible
undesirable effects of, for example, allowing severely
disabled infants to die slowly from dehydration or infec-tion because we believe it wrong to kill them p.s
*euthanasia
Jonathan Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives
(Har-mondsworth, 1977)
J McMahan, The Ethics of Killing (Oxford, 2002).
James Rachels, The End of Life (Oxford, 1986).
Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1993),
chs 4–6
Kim, Jaegwon (1934– ) Author of numerous well-known papers on metaphysics and epistemology, best known for his pioneering work on *events, *super-venience concepts, and psychophysical relations Kim takes events to be exemplifications of properties (or rela-tions) by an object (or set of objects) at a time On this view, Oedipus’ marrying Jocasta and Oedipus’ marrying his mother would be the same event, while Brutus’ killing Caesar and Brutus’ stabbing Caesar would be different events Kim has argued for a form of materialism in which mental properties are ‘locally reducible’ to physical prop-erties by way of species-specific correlating laws Non-reductive materialism, he argues, collapses either into a position in which mental properties do no causal work (a form of eliminativism) or into one in which mental prop-erties do not depend in any significant way on physical
*mind, problems of the philosophy of
J Kim, Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays
(Cam-bridge, 1993)
—— Mind in a Physical World (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).
kind, natural It is easier to say what a natural kind term is
than to say what natural kinds themselves are, ontologic-ally speaking Natural kind terms constitute a class of gen-eral terms and include both mass terms, like ‘gold’ and
‘water’, and certain *sortal terms, like ‘tiger’ and ‘apple’ Loosely, they may be said to denote types of naturally occurring stuffs and things Kripke has argued that natural kind terms are *rigid designators e.j.l
S P Schwartz (ed.), Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds (Ithaca,
NY, 1977)
Kindı¯, Yaaqu¯b ibn Ish.a¯q al- (d after 870) Widely known
as the first Arab philosopher, he was instrumental in the spread of Greek philosophy in the state-endowed Acad-emy in Baghdad He commissioned translations of Greek philosophical texts that served as inspiration for his own Arabic works, which identify the formative, syncretic period of Islamic philosophy He is the first Islamic philosopher to offer systematic explanations for some of the debated theological issues of his time, such as creation, immortality, God’s knowledge, and prophecy His
On First Philosophy was the first Arabic work on syncretic
metaphysics Though some of the issues he defined, such
as creation ex nihilo, were later rejected, many, such as
immortality of the individual soul, and the distinction
Kindı¯, al- 477
Trang 9between human and revealed knowledge, helped define
lasting problems of Islamic philosophy h.z
Al-Kindı¯’s Metaphysics, tr Alfred L Ivry (Albany, NY, 1974).
kine¯sis. Aristotle’s distinction between kine¯sis (motion,
change), and energeia (activity, actualization) prefigures
various contemporary distinctions in the philosophy of
agency Theologically the notion occurs in ‘first mover’
proofs of God’s existence: things changed in a basic quality
can only be changed by something which, at the time of
change, has that quality In such a series, argued Aquinas,
*infinite regress is impossible; hence there must be a first
*prime mover
T Penner, ‘Verbs and the Identity of Actions: A Philosophical
Exercise in the Interpretation of Aristotle’, in O P Wood and
G Pitcher (eds.), Ryle: A Collection of Critical Essays (London,
1970)
Philip Kitcher(1947– ) Contemporary philosopher of
science, defender of naturalism in philosophy, British-born
but US-based Kitcher focused initially on philosophy of
biology and mathematics, but is now expansive in his
interests Vaulting Ambition (1985) was a harsh critique of
sociobiology But Kitcher has also resisted various
argu-ments alleging conceptual problems with mainstream
evolutionary theory In the 1980s he defended the view
that explanation in science is a matter of unification This
view, developed partly in reaction to causal theories of
explanation, exemplifies his metaphysical
outlook—gen-erally realist but attracted to Kantian options in the area of
causation Kitcher presented a total philosophy of science
in his weighty Advancement of Science (1993) Here and
else-where, he has engaged in detail with claims that science
has been shown to be essentially non-rational when
fun-damental theoretical choices are made He defends a
mod-erate conception of scientific progress and rationality, and
includes innovative mathematical modelling of science’s
social organization Kitcher’s recent work has extended
into ethics and the political role of science The Lives to
Come (1996) was commissioned by the Library of
Con-gress as a philosophical exploration of the human genome
P Kitcher, The Advancement of Science (Oxford, 1993).
—— Science, Truth, and Democracy (Oxford, 2001).
—— In Mendel’s Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology
(Oxford, 2003)
klepsydra. The klepsydra was typically a metal vessel
with an aperture at its narrow neck and little holes which
could be plugged at its wide end It is sometimes thought
that the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles used it to
prove the reality and substantiality of air, by pointing out
that, when inverted in water with the little holes plugged,
water was prevented from rising in it, but, with the holes
unplugged, water rose unhindered by the air which it
expelled As air was in fact one of the four Greek elements,
there was taken to be no need for any proof of its distinct
reality What Empedocles sought to prove by his remarks was the independent reality of *space, which had just been denied by the Eleatics The air was expelled, but not its space, which was left behind for water to occupy The Greeks needed the reality of space to prove the possibility
John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (London, 1892).
Kneale, William Calvert (1906–90) British philosopher and historian of logic, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford (1932–60), and White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford (1960–6) Kneale published in many areas includ-ing metaphysics, philosophical logic, philosophy of mind,
and moral philosophy In Probability and Induction (1949),
he surveys classical theories of induction, argues that probability theory cannot justify induction, and offers his own justification Here and elsewhere he argues for the importance of natural necessity in understanding law,
causation, and subjunctive conditionals The Development
of Logic, written with his wife, Martha, is both a history of
logic and an introduction to logic and topics connected to
it This thick book devotes about half of its 761 pages to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with extended
*necessity, nomic
William Kneale and Martha Hurst Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford, 1962).
knowledge.The principal intellectual attainment studied
by *epistemology Virtually all theorists agree that true belief is a necessary condition for knowledge, and it was once thought that justification, when added to true belief, yields a necessary and sufficient condition for knowledge Its sufficiency, however, was disproved by Gettier as
follows Suppose one justifiably believes q although it
is false; then one reasonably infers p, which is true The result is a justified true belief in p, yet one cannot be said
to know that p Can the problem be solved by requiring that no intermediate conclusions like q be false? No;
other counter-examples remain Sam believes, through visual appearance, that a lighted candle is before him There is indeed a candle there but Sam sees only a holo-gram of a candle, not the real candle, which is blocked from view Then Sam lacks knowledge, although he has justified true belief that rests on no false intermediate conclusions
Other theories of knowledge put less weight on justifi-cation According to the causal theory, knowledge con-sists in true belief that bears an appropriate causal connection to the fact in question This handles the candle case because its presence is causally unconnected to Sam’s belief Reliability theories say that someone knows only if his true belief is acquired by a reliable process or method This may be understood to entail the *counterfactual
requirement: S would not believe p if p were false.
Causal, reliability, and counterfactual theories are gen-erally called ‘externalist’, because they make it possible to
478 Kindı¯,
Trang 10al-satisfy the conditions for knowledge (e.g
causal-connection conditions) without being aware that one
satisfies them ‘Internalist’ theories emphasize conditions
of which subjects are aware The demarcation between
these types of theory is problematic, however, because
paradigmatic internalist theories, such as coherentism,
may also make knowledge attainable through
subject-ively inaccessible conditions Whether a belief coheres
with the rest of one’s beliefs, for example, might not be
readily accessible to the subject
Epistemologists often look to theories of knowledge to
settle the problem of *scepticism, but how easily this
prob-lem can be settled is questionable One theory says that a
person knows p only if he ‘discriminates’ it from relevant
alternatives This ostensibly favours anti-scepticism
because not all logically possible alternatives seem
rele-vant Suppose Jane sees a barn in the field Although she
cannot discriminate it from a papier-mâché facsimile, such
a facsimile is not a relevant alternative (unless facsimiles
abound in the neighbourhood) Scepticism might gain a
foothold here, however, by claiming that every logically
possible alternative is relevant Who is right in this
dis-pute, and is there a determinate answer?
This raises methodological issues about the theory of
knowledge Is it a theory of some evaluator-independent
‘stuff ’, on the model of the chemical theory of water? Or is
it a theory of human concepts and their deployment? On
the former approach, there should always be a fact about
whether someone knows, but why should our ordinary
judgements be reliable guides to such facts? On the latter
approach, knowledge may be a very fuzzy concept that
has determinate applications only when certain
param-eters are set, and these paramparam-eters can legitimately be set
either to the sceptic’s or to the anti-sceptic’s taste a.i.g
*justification, epistemic; reliabilism; foundationalism;
knowledge, limits of; sociology of knowledge; tacit
knowledge; virtues, intellectual
A Goldman, Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social
Sci-ences (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
K Lehrer, Theory of Knowledge (Boulder, Colo., 1990).
R Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).
T Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford, 2000).
knowledge, the limits of The issue of the extent and
limits of human *knowledge is a perplexing one There is
no way of establishing a proportion between what we
know and what we do not We clearly cannot estimate the
amount of knowledge yet to be discovered (both because
there is no real measure of what is known and because we
have no reliable information regarding new knowledge
yet to come) We realize that our knowledge contains
errors of omission and commission but do not know just
where they lie
Is human knowledge completable? The
incompletabil-ity of scientific progress is compatible with the view that
every question that can be asked at any particular state of
the art is going to be answered—or dissolved—at some
future state: it does not commit one to the idea that there
are any unanswerable questions placed altogether beyond the limits of possible resolution No recourse to insolubilia need be made to maintain the incompletability of our sci-entific knowledge How could we possibly establish that a
question Q will continue to be both raisable and unanswer-able in every future state of science, seeing that we cannot
now circumscribe the changes that science might undergo
in the future? If a question belongs to science at all—if it reflects the sort of issue that science might possibly resolve
in principle and in theory—then we shall never be in a position to put it beyond the reach of possible future states
*justification, epistemic
E McMullin, ‘Limits of Scientific Inquiry’, in J C Steinhardt (ed.),
Science and the Modern World (New York, 1966).
N Rescher, The Limits of Science (Berkeley, Calif., 1984).
knowledge, theories of: see epistemology, history of;
epistemology, problems of
knowledge and science Science systematically corrects the errors of *common sense Thus, from science we learned that, contrary to first appearances, the sun does not go round the earth each day But what happens when science seems to undermine not particular beliefs, but whole tracts of experience? Can science really tell us that, say, the world is not in itself coloured or that the famous solid, unmoving table of Eddington’s physicist is mostly empty space thinly populated with rapidly moving par-ticles? Too radical a correction of common sense by science runs the danger of depriving scientific theories of the ultimately commonsensical evidential basis on which they depend It would be safer to regard the theories of science as a whole as offering highly generalized and effective abstractions from the richness of what there is, rather than as the only or the whole truth a.o’h
*science, history of the philosophy of; science, prob-lems of the philosophy of
G F Macdonald (ed.), Perception and Identity (London, 1979), esp.
the essays by M Dummett and P F Strawson and the replies
of A J Ayer
knowledge by presence Distinguished from acquired
*knowledge, this technical term is used in Islamic philoso-phy to designate a non-predicative mode of cognition required prior to the definition and construction of funda-mental philosophical principles Similar in sense to Plato’s
‘intellectual vision’, and in form to Aristotle’s ‘quick wit’
(ankhinoia), it was first fully formulated by Sohravardı¯.
This type of knowledge posits priority to the self-conscious subject’s immediate grasp of the real, manifest essence of objects Tantamount to primary intuition, sim-ilar to Kant’s ‘immediate relation to objects’, but not reduced to Russell’s ‘knowledge by *acquaintance’, it was given objective validity by later mystics and theologians, who emphasized its mystical and experiential implica-tions, and made rhetorical use of it to ‘prove’ the primacy
knowledge by presence 479