The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 58 doc

There is extensive political and moral discussion about the proper role of markets in society, ranging from those who think that the allocation of all goods and services should be determ

prescriptive in pointing to reasons for performing certain

actions regardless of one’s wants He thinks it possible and

desirable to jettison this objectively prescriptive element

in moral discourse and to continue using the same moral

terms, not necessarily accepting previously held moral

views, but (re)inventing morality as a device for

counter-acting limited sympathies, and giving it whatever content

we think best serves this purpose

In his comprehensive study of *causality, which draws

extensively on historical sources, Mackie distinguishes an

analysis of causation ‘as it is in the objects’ from an

analy-sis of our ordinary concept of causation, offering a

regu-larity analysis for the former, and a *counterfactual

analysis for the latter, supplementing each with an

account of the direction of causation The regularity

analysis is his memorable development from Mill, that a

cause is an ‘inus’ condition of an effect—an insufficient but

necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition.

His counterfactual analysis is that a cause is necessary in

the circumstances for an effect, such counterfactual claims

being, according to him, strictly speaking neither true

J L Mackie, The Cement of the Universe (Oxford, 1974), chs 2 and 3.

—— Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, 1977),

ch 1

Macmurray, John(1891–1976) British philosopher who

held chairs in London and Edinburgh He maintained that

the error of traditional philosophy consisted in making its

starting-point the self as subject—‘I think’ Macmurray

proposed as the starting-point the self as agent—‘I do.’ He

argued that thought is derivative from action, and that the

identity of the self as agent is constituted by its

relation-ships with other agents in communities His belief that we

are members not just of the human community but of the

natural world gives his thinking a contemporary flavour

reminiscent of much ‘applied philosophy’ He held that

religion is distinctive of personal life, in that it celebrates

and expresses the unity of persons in fellowship He had a

large following among the general public through his

many broadcasts in the 1930s and 1940s which illustrated

his desire, expressed in his Gifford Lectures, to ‘transfer

the centre of gravity in philosophy from thought to

David Fergusson and Nigel Dower (eds.), John Macmurray:

Crit-ical Perspectives (New York, 2002).

John Macmurray, The Form of the Personal (London, 1991).

macrocosm and microcosm.This pair of terms

encapsu-lates the idea that a systematic analogy can be drawn

between larger- and smaller-scale phenomena,

particu-larly between the cosmic and the human Thus it may be

supposed that astronomical bodies bear the same mutual

relations as do the parts of an individual animal body, or

that the universe is ordered in the way that a human

society is The terminology may have been introduced in

the fifth century bc by Democritus; but such analogies

are also characteristic of Pythagorean, Platonic, and Stoic

philosophy They are not justified by argument, but they may have heuristic value as facilitating exploration of what would otherwise be hard to access for investigation Plato certainly supposed natural science could be prose-cuted effectively only by one who appreciated the elem-ent of value which was implicit in the designation of the

universe as kosmos, ‘order’. j.d.g.e

A recent discussion of *Pre-Socratic philosophy which takes

the analogy very seriously is A Capizzi, The Cosmic Republic

(Amsterdam, 1990)

Madhva (13th century ad) Dualist commentator on

*Veda¯nta, part of the revealed scriptures of the Hindus Madhva defends the reality of the external world, includ-ing infinitely divisible space, time, souls, bodies, and their unique particularities Warning that you cannot adore God if you think that you are identical with him, he also celebrates all five differences denied by the idealist monists, namely, God ≠the world, God ≠I, I ≠you, I ≠the table, the table ≠ the chair Such pluralism provoked astute rebuttals from the monists and counter-replies from the dualists for centuries Distinctions, according to

Madhva, are objective negative facts witnessed directly by

the self rather than perceived through outer or inner sense His rich epistemology tackles issues such as ‘If knowledge is self-validating, how can one tell its claim from an error’s claim to knowledge?’ Liberation, attain-able only through devoted worship of the personal God, brings blissful proximity to, but never equality with, God, though some sinners (non-dualists?) remain eternally

*Indian philosophy

S S Raghavachar, Dvaita Vedanta (Madras, 1977).

magnitude.The particular amount, degree, or extent of a quantitative property Thus 1 metre and 10 metres are dif-ferent magnitudes of length Magnitudes are represented mathematically by scales of *measurement, which assign

a unique numerical value to each magnitude of the quan-titative property Scales are typically (but not exclusively) defined by selecting a standard whose magnitude becomes the unit, 1 The *number assigned to any other magnitude is determined by how many times greater it is than that of the standard Thus a length ten times greater than that of the standard metre is represented by 10 on the metric scale Magnitudes are measured by empirically comparing objects directly or indirectly to the standard

w.a.d

B Ellis, Basic Concepts of Measurement (Cambridge, 1966).

Maimonides, Moses (1135–1204) Jewish philosopher, jurist, physician Exiled from his native Cordoba by the Almohad conquest (1148), Moses ben Maimon (also known as Rambam) settled finally in Egypt, where he

became physician to Saladin’s wazir His Arabic Commen-tary on the Mishnah, his Book of the Commandments, and his fourteen-volume Code of Jewish Law, the Mishneh Torah,

550 Mackie, John L.

written in Mishnaic Hebrew, established his unparalleled

authority in Jewish law His Guide to the Perplexed (written

in Arabic), addressed to a philosophically minded

disciple, deconstructs the seeming anthropomorphisms of

prophetic language to reveal the underlying logic of God’s

absolute perfection Neither biblical creationism nor

Aris-totelian eternalism is demonstrable, it argues But

cre-ation is more probable, and preferable theologically, since

it can explain the difference God’s act makes in the world

and can rely on God’s freedom to explain how multiplicity

emerges from sheer divine simplicity Revelation

accom-modates its recipients intellectually and culturally Its

fun-damental demand is that we pursue the human likeness to

God by perfecting humanity in ourselves—minimally, by

living in peace with one another, as we might have known

without revelation What distinguishes God’s law is its

further expectation that we perfect ourselves morally and

intellectually, improving our character through such

exer-cises as reloading our enemy’s fallen ass (Exodus 23: 5);

and improving our minds by seeking contact with God

through study of nature, mathematics, and human and

divine institutions, and contemplating God’s perfection

Prophets are (as al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯ claimed) philosophers whose

imaginative gifts afford the rhetoric, symbol, and story

that transform abstract ideas and values into laws, rituals,

and beliefs, allowing non-philosophers access to the moral

and intellectual fruits of philosophic insight Philosophy is

universal; but the moral prerequisites of intellectual

receptivity and the material perquisites of prophetic

cre-ativity (confidence, contentment, a fertile and wholesome

imagination, fostered by appropriate linguistic and

cul-tural traditions) make true prophecy rare Pagan religions

are primitive, superstitious, or perverse; but Islam and

Christianity, which have spread monotheism through the

world, preparing for the Messianic age, are derivative

L E Goodman (ed.), Rambam (New York, 1976).

Maine de Biran, François-Pierre (1766–1824) French

philosopher and politician Maine de Biran is an empiricist

philosopher because he holds that all knowledge is

acquired through experience However, while the

clas-sical British Empiricists tend to the view that inner

experi-ence is made possible by outer experiexperi-ence, Maine de Biran

reverses this picture For example, while Locke holds that

acquaintance with sensations is a necessary condition for

the operations of reflection, Maine de Biran holds that

unless we were acquainted with the contents of our own

minds we could not have knowledge of the external

world He claims that there is a sens intime (inner sense) or

lumière intérieure (inner light) through which each person

is aware of his own mental states, especially states of

‘croyance’ (belief ), and aware of his own ‘effort voulu’

(voluntary physical action)

It is not clear that acquaintance with one’s own mental

states is a sufficient condition for knowledge of anything

else, but it could be argued that Maine de Biran has

isol-ated a necessary condition for knowledge if, for example,

a person’s knowing that they know that P is a condition for their knowing that P This claim is, however, contentious.

s.p

*empiricism

Œuvres philosophiques de Maine de Biran, 4 vols (Paris, 1841).

Mair, John (or John Major) (1467–1550) Leader of a group of philosopher-logicians, many of them Scots, active in Paris and Scotland in the decades before the Reformation Educated at Paris, where he rose to become Professor of Theology, he was subsequently Principal of Glasgow University During his last years, while Provost

of St Salvator’s College, St Andrews, he was the theology teacher of John Knox He wrote numerous treatises on formal logic, presenting in great detail a system in direct line of descent from the logic of William Ockham Many things he had to say on *supposition and *quantification, particularly on sentences containing several quantifiers,

A Broadie, The Circle of John Mair: Logic and Logicians in Pre-Reformation Scotland (Oxford, 1985).

Maistre, Joseph Marie de: see de Maistre.

Malcolm, Norman Adrian (1911–90) One of the most dis-tinguished of Wittgenstein’s pupils and the main con-veyor of his ideas to the USA, where Malcolm taught for many years at Cornell His writings were primarily in epis-temology and philosophy of mind They are distinguished not only by force of argument, but also by lucidity and

simplicity of expression His book Memory and Mind is the

finest on that subject, submitting both classical empiricist and modern neurological representationalist theories of

memory to devastating criticism In Consciousness and Causality, he developed Wittgenstein’s ideas on that

theme, undermining introspectionist and materialist

the-ories of *consciousness alike His Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir has rightly been called ‘a classic of biographical literature’, and his last book, Nothing is Hidden, is a

valu-able study of Wittgenstein’s later philosophical criticisms

*Wittgensteinians

G H von Wright, ‘Norman Malcolm’, Philosophical Investigations

(1992)

Malebranche, Nicolas(1638–1715) Highly regarded in his own day, and long regarded in the francophone world

as a philosopher of major importance, the author of The Search After Truth (De la recherche de la verité (1674–5) ) and the Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688) has only

quite recently been brought in from the cold by English-speaking philosophers The doctrine for which he is chiefly remembered, the theory of *occasionalism, seems bizarre to many modern readers who tend (following the damning verdict of Leibniz) to see it as a blundering piece

of adhocery: an attempt to plug a logical gap in Cartesian

*dualism (its inability to explain how mind and body,

Malebranche, Nicolas 551

being incompatible substances, can interact causally) by

dumping on to the Deity the task of obligingly ensuring

that my jaw moves for me when I want to eat a meal But

in fact Malebranche invokes the efficacious will of God for

all causal transactions, not just psychophysical ones ‘A

true cause, as I understand it’, he wrote in the Recherche, ‘is

one such that the mind perceives a necessary connection

between it and its effect’; and if causation implies

neces-sary connection, then the divine will must be involved in

all causality, since true necessity applies only to events

willed by God (it being a contradiction that anything

willed by an omnipotent being should not come about)

In the Malebranchian universe individual objects and

events are thus stripped of their causal powers Talk of

causal ‘influence’ or ‘transfer of force’ is only a façon de

parler In reality, what we call the cause is merely the

occa-sion for God to exercise his efficacious will Malebranche

thus radically rejects the scholastic conception whereby

each kind of object behaved the way it did in virtue of its

specific nature or essence, with properties being

‘trans-mitted’ from cause to effect In the new Cartesian

concep-tion of physics (which Malebranche strongly supports),

the idea of some kind of essential connection or similarity

between causes and effects is ultimately redundant; all

that is needed is a specification of initial conditions, and a

set of mathematical equations describing the (divinely

decreed) regularities that in fact obtain Seen in this light,

Malebranchian occasionalism can be viewed as a bridge

theory between Cartesian and the later Humean account

of *causality

Malebranche subscribed to what is commonly called a

*‘representative’ theory of perception, arguing that ‘we

do not perceive objects external to us by themselves’ since

‘it is not likely that the soul should leave the body to stroll

about the heavens to behold the sun and the stars’; when

we perceive the sun, what we see is ‘not the sun but

some-thing intimately joined to our soul, which I call an “idea” ’

In developing his account of the direct objects of

percep-tion, Malebranche went on to advance a distinctive theory

of *ideas, summed up in the slogan that ‘we see all things

in God’ Condemned by Locke as ‘an opinion that spreads

not, and is like to die of itself’, Malebranche’s theory at

least tidies up some of the ambiguities in Descartes’s

broad use of the term ‘idea’ Malebranche is careful to

dis-tinguish the mental phenomena he calls ‘sentiments’

(feel-ings or sensations) which are purely subjective and lack

any intentionality (do not have representational content),

from what he calls ideas in the strict sense; the latter are

abstract objects of cognition whose presence ‘in God’ may

be viewed as a graphic way of conveying their

independ-ence from any subjective mode of consciousness The

resulting theory has the merit of making a firm distinction

between the province of psychology and that of logic

A further important subject on which Malebranche

takes issue with *Cartesianism concerns the alleged

trans-parency of the mind—its supposed perfect internal

aware-ness of its own nature as a ‘thinking thing’ Descartes has

achieved this result by the dubious move of subsuming a

large number of different operations (understanding, will-ing, imaginwill-ing, sensing) under the single label ‘thought’ Malebranche argues persuasively that the various possible modifications of consciousness are not clearly and dis-tinctly deducible from a known essence (in the way in which the modifications of matter are deducible from the nature of extension); further, introspection can reveal only the presence of conscious activity, not the essential nature of the thinking self: ‘to myself, I am but darkness, and my own substance seems something which is beyond

my understanding’ (Christian Metaphysical Meditations

S Brown (ed.), Nicolas Malebranche: His Philosophical Critics and Successors (Maastricht, 1991).

N Jolley, The Light of the Soul (Oxford, 1990).

C McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy (Oxford, 1983).

S Nadler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche

(Cambridge, 2000)

malin génie.Descartes hypothesized a malin génie (evil

spirit) in the course of his search for a truth that was absolutely immune from doubt He found that even the truths of mathematics were not thus immune, for an evil spirit might be causing him to give his assent to math-ematical propositions which are in fact false a.bro

*brain in a vat; scepticism

R Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation 1.

Mandeville, Bernard(c.1670–1733) was trained in

medi-cine in his native Holland, and settled in England in the early 1690s He was a polemical writer, and the principal target of his polemics was hypocrisy For Mandeville, behind the mask of respectability and virtue lay a Hobbe-sian egoism, which had to be faced up to in any through-going moral, political, and economic theory, and he was prepared to follow the consequences for all three of these

areas His most important work, The Fable of the Bees,

began as a 433-line poem in 1705, but by the sixth edition

of 1729 it had turned into a substantial treatise It is an extremely witty and provocative book, if somewhat chaotic Mandeville imagines a hive of bees each going about their own business in their own way and argues that their success is due as much to vice and fraud as it is to industry and virtue: all these are necessary for a flourish-ing market society, and indeed they mirror the egoistic qualities of the individuals who make up this society

s.gau

B Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 2 vols., with commentary by

F B Kaye (Oxford, 1924)

E G Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable (Cambridge, 1994).

Manichaeism.This widely influential gnostic religion of late antiquity, founded and spread by the Persian Mani (216–77), taught a radical dualism of good and evil that is metaphysically grounded in coeternal and independent cosmic powers of Light and Darkness This world was regarded as a mixture of good and evil in which spirit represents Light and matter represents Darkness

552 Malebranche, Nicolas

Manichaean morality was severely ascetic Before his

con-version to Christianity, Augustine was an adherent of

*Gnosticism

H Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston, 1958).

manifold of sense.This is the expression Kant uses to

refer to the data supplied to the mind through *sensation

In the Critique of Pure Reason, he argues that these data are

given in accordance with the mind’s forms of sensibility,

space and time, and that their unification, which is

neces-sary for experience, is brought about through the

syn-thetic activity of the imagination guided by the

H J Paton, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience (New York, 1936).

Mannheim, Karl (1893–1947) Hungarian-German-British

philosopher, father of the sociology of knowledge He was

originally a member of the Sunday Circle in Budapest, led

by Georg Lukács, which opposed *Kantianism,

*posi-tivism, and individualist liberal *capitalism, was nostalgic

for the Middle Ages, and held a strongly Platonic view of

psychic life and art After his emigration to Germany in

1919 Mannheim tried to initiate a theoretical social science

that could replace political philosophy Social thought

expresses rather than explains human life Implicitly, this

relegates political philosophy to the rank of a

half-conscious projection of social aspirations The task of

theory is therefore to understand what people think about

society rather than propose hypotheses about it This did

not prevent Mannheim from expressing his own political

preferences in favour of an étatiste (statist–welfarist)

democracy led by rational planners and scientists g.m.t

His main works are:

Ideology and Utopia (London, 1929).

Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (London, 1940).

mantra. Literally, words which if meditated upon can

save us A subsection of the ritualistic part of the orally

pre-served sacred texts called Veda was also called ‘Mantra’

because it consisted of revealed holy words, often

addressed to nature-gods, chanted during sacrificial acts

Subsequently, the term signified any mystic syllable or

strings thereof which were to be repeated, aloud or

sub-vocally or mentally, often while keeping count on rosary

beads ‘Om’ is such a syllable, often identified with the

word-God which became the world Elaborate

meta-physical and semantic theories developed to support the

putative identity between the name and the named which

went hand in hand with the worship of sound a.c

*Veda¯nta; Indian philosophy

‘Mantra’, in Mircea Eliade (ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion, ix

(London, 1987)

many questions fallacy Illustrated by ‘Have you stopped

beating your wife?’, the fallacy was first noticed by

Aris-totle It lies not in the question but in what is inferred from

the answer Putting B for ‘I have been a wife-beater’ and S

for ‘I have stopped’, then a negative answer is equivalent

to ‘(B and not-S) or (not-B and not-S) or (not-B and S)’ If

the questioner infers that he may disregard one or more of these alternatives, his inference is transparently invalid

j.woo

John Woods and Douglas Walton, Fallacies: Selected Papers 1972–1982 (Dordrecht, 1989).

many-valued logic.Logical systems in which formulae may be assigned truth-values other than merely ‘true’ and

‘false’ The term is often used more narrowly to refer to

many-valued tabular logics, in which the truth-value of a

formula is determined by the truth-values of its subformu-lae (This characteristic distinguishes many-valued logics from standard *modal logics.)

The idea that logic ought to countenance more than two truth-values arose naturally in ancient and medieval discussions of *determinism and was re-examined by C S Peirce, Hugh MacColl, and Nikolai Vasiliev in the first decade of this century Explicit formulation and system-atic investigation of many-valued logics began with writ-ings of Jan Łukasiewicz and Emil Post in the 1920s and

D Bochvar, Jerzy Stupecki, and Stephen Kleene in the late 1930s There has been some renewed interest in the sub-ject recently, because of perceived connections with pro-gramming languages and artificial intelligence

Łukasiewicz’s work is inspired by a view of ‘future con-tingents’ often attributed to Aristotle There is a sense in which whatever happens in the present or past is now unalterable This idea sometimes finds expression in the doctrine that sentences now true are unalterably true and those now false are unalterably false But, although it seems that ‘There will be a sea battle tomorrow’ is now

either true or false, it does not seem unalterably true or unalterably false Considerations like this led Łukasiewicz

to adopt the view that future contingent sentences are not

either true or false, but have an intermediate truth-value,

‘the possible’ He constructed a formal language, taking the conditional (→) and negation (¬) as primitive connec-tives and false (0), possible (½), and true (1) as truth-values Truth-values of compound formulae are deter-mined by the tables below

To obtain a many-valued logic from a table like this, one specifies certain truth-values as designated The argument from set Γ to formula A is logically valid if A gets a

designated truth-value under any assignment in which

many-valued logic 553

all the members of Γ do A is logically true if it gets a

des-ignated value under any assignment For example, if

fig-ure 1 and fi are both designated, then (P→¬P)→¬P is a

logical truth by these tables; if (as Łukasiewicz intended)

only figure 1 is designated, then it is not With

Łukasiewicz’s understanding that P∨Q abbreviates (P→

Q)→Q, the formula in question expresses the law of

excluded middle

It is doubtful that these (or any) truth-tables capture

precisely the kind of possibility exhibited by future

contin-gents Why, for example, should ‘If there won’t be a sea

battle there will be one’ be considered true, while ‘If

2 + 2 = 4 then there will be a sea battle’ is merely possible?

Nevertheless, Łukasiewicz’s original system has been

generalized, axiomatized, reinterpreted, modified, and

otherwise studied

Łukasiewicz himself considered generalizations

per-mitting more than one intermediate truth-value: ¬A gets

truth-value 1 minus the truth-value of A; A∨B gets the

greater of the truth-values of A and B Other many-valued

systems have been motivated by the idea that additional

truth-values might express the notion of a proposition’s

being paradoxical (its truth implying its falsity and its

fal-sity implying its truth), of its having uncomputable

truth-value, of its being approximately true, and of its having

failed presuppositions of various sorts Most of the

sys-tems considered generalize classical logic in the sense that,

if truth-values other than 0 and 1 are dropped, classical

logic is obtained

Post formulated a technically advantageous system in

which Łukasiewicz’s negation is replaced by a ‘cyclic’

negation—the values are 0, 1, , m and the

truth-value of ¬A is 0 if the truth-truth-value of A is m and it is 1 + the

truth-value of A otherwise Post’s negation and disjunction

are truth-functionally complete: any connective in a

finite-valued logic (including the conditional and negation of

Łukasiewicz’s three-valued logic discussed above) can be

defined from them This result has practical significance,

for just as the formulae of classical propositional logic

cor-respond to logic circuits, the formulae of m-valued logics

correspond to switching-circuits in which inputs and

out-puts can assume m states More recent investigations have

examined the model theory and proof theory of general

many-valued logic and of continuous logic, in which the

truth-values are assumed to have a topological structure It

is enlightening to see certain results of classical logic

proved in a more general setting s.t.k

The works cited below are a small sample of the large and varied

literature on the subject, but they do contain references to much

of the rest

N Rescher, Many-Valued Logic (New York, 1969).

A Urquhart, ‘Many-Valued Logic’, in D Gabbay and F

Guenth-ner (eds.), Handbook of Philosophical Logic, iii (Dordrecht, 1986).

R Wójcicki, Theory of Logical Calculi: Basic Theory of Consequence

Operations (Dordrecht, 1988).

R Wolf, ‘A Survey of Many-Valued Logic 1966–1974’, in J M

Dunn and G Epstein (eds.), Modern Uses of Multiple-Valued Logic

(Dordrecht, 1975)

Marcel, Gabriel(1889–1973) French philosopher, play-wright, and literary and music critic who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1929 Marcel (despite, in common with the other Existentialists, repudiating the title ‘Exist-entialist’) provides Christian solutions to existentialist problems

In Être et avoir (Being and Having (1935) ) Marcel draws

a distinction between one’s being and one’s life ‘I am’ is existentially prior to ‘I live’ (meaning, approximately, that being is a necessary condition for living but not vice versa) Marcel takes this as a ground for believing that my life was ‘given to me’, a fact which is sufficiently impres-sive to suggest the existence of God

In a fashion analogous to Heidegger’s use of ‘being-toward-death’ Marcel notes that one’s being is at every moment ‘in jeopardy’ and concludes that the only way to understand the ‘ordeal’ of living is to have faith in one’s being ‘beyond’ one’s life, that is, surviving one’s death Marcel’s existentialist metaphysics faces the difficulty that from the fact that I am not numerically identical with the life that I lead it does not logically follow that I pre-date

or post-date that life Similarly, from the fact that life is a senseless ordeal without God it does not logically follow that God exists However, neither of these objections is strong enough to show that the central tenets of Marcel’s theological *existentialism are false

In ‘Existence and Freedom’ (1946) Marcel criticizes Heidegger, Jaspers, but especially Sartre for their ‘dog-matic negativism’ (their *pessimism about human prospects), a charge Sartre attempts to repudiate in his maligned but brilliant 1946 speech ‘L’Existentialisme est

K T Gallagher, The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, foreword by

Gabriel Marcel (New York, 1962)

G Marcel, The Mystery of Being, tr René Hague (London, 1950–1).

Marcus, Ruth(1921– ) Ruth Marcus is known as an early pioneer of *modal logic, the logic which formalizes the philosophical notions of possibility and necessity Marcus, originally Ruth Barcan, was instrumental in exploring modal logics with quantifiers and assessing the philosoph-ical implications of mixing modality and quantification A well-known formula in quantified modal logic, the

*Barcan formula, bears her name; in one version it states that if everything necessarily bears a certain property, then it is a necessary truth that everything bears it Marcus has also done a great deal of work in other areas of logic, most notably on the substitutional interpretation of quantifiers, an approach which takes quantifiers to range not over ordinary objects but over linguistic symbols (in a prescribed formal language) which produce true

R Marcus, Modalities: Philosophical Essays (Oxford, 1993).

Marcuse, Herbert(1898–1979) One of the most original and provocative non-Soviet Marxists of the century, Mar-cuse received a doctorate in literature (1922) but soon became attracted to Heidegger’s philosophy with its focus

554 many-valued logic

on the individual as thrown into a world of objects and

populated with others But the writings of the young Marx

convinced Marcuse that a genuine theory of individuality

must take into account prevailing socio-economic

struc-tures Joining the *Frankfurt School in 1933, he

con-tributed to the development of the dialectical criticism

characteristic of the school: major concepts were analysed

and traced to their material origins, and then

recon-structed to show their altered political functions

His post-Second World War writings, however,

pre-sent his most characteristic proposals and social critique

Freudian psychology provided a theory of human

instincts, which are repressed under capitalism but which,

when liberated, can be the basis for a life of sensousness,

playfulness, peace, and beauty This liberation requires a

total transformation of present society: technology would

be utilized to abolish poverty and provide for abundance;

there would be a different relation to nature in which art

and production are unified; the sexes and generations

would overcome artificial constraints, and a new kind of

person with advanced sensibilities would appear

Marcuse’s optimism for the actual achievement of

these transformations was at its lowest in One Dimensional

Man (1964); the student rebellions of the 1960s gave him

renewed hope (e.g Essay on Liberation (1969) )

Counter-revolution and Revolt (1972) retreats from advocating

revo-lutionary violence and confrontation and recommends

working for change within the system The Aesthetic

Dimension (1978) argues that the sensuous appearance of

beauty in the artwork preserves the memory of a liberated

way of living and so escapes the domination of the

pre-sent, repressive order

Marcuse’s revised Marxism provides both a broad

cri-tique of advanced capitalist society and utopian proposals

*Marxist philosophy

Barry Katz, Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation: An Intellectual

Biography (London, 1982).

Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism

(Berkeley, Calif., 1984)

Maritain, Jacques (1882–1973) The best-known

neo-Thomist of the twentieth century Having become

dis-satisfied with secularism and scientism, at the age of 24

Maritain converted to Roman Catholicism and spent the

following sixty or so years elaborating a comprehensive

philosophical system based on the writings of Thomas

Aquinas and of his scholastic followers, most especially

John of St Thomas (1589–1644) His major contributions

are to epistemology (The Degrees of Knowledge (1932) ),

social philosophy (The Person and the Common Good (1947)),

and aesthetics (Art and Scholasticism (1920)) Maritain

is a staunch realist in metaphysics and epistemology: he

advocates ontological pluralism, claiming that there are

various non-reducible levels of existence, e.g the physical,

the biological, the psychological, the social, and the

spiritual; and similarly he insists upon the diversity of

our ways of knowing reality, emphasizing the role of

rational and creative intuition and thereby linking

*neo-Thomism

R McInerny, Art and Prudence: Studies in the Thought of Jacques Maritain (Notre Dame, Ind., 1988).

markets.Originally, places at which independent sellers, who were usually also the producers, made their goods available to consumers coming there specifically to shop for them; terms of exchange (prices) were characteris-tically established for each individual transaction by hag-gling The term ‘market’ is currently used to refer not only

to particular local places but to the entirety of *free exchanges of goods and services within a society, by con-trast with the sphere in which exchanges are enforced by

an authority external to the transfer of goods or services The term ‘market’ is thus usually used interchangeably with ‘free market’, the implication being that prices are set

by agreement between buyers and sellers In this more abstract sense, the idea of the market is defined by the set

of socially understood or enforced rights of participants:

an arena of transfers is a market in so far as the disposition

of the goods and services in question is at the will of vol-untarily acting individuals or co-operating sets of individ-uals, terms of exchange (prices) being freely negotiated Prices are then determined by effective supply and demand on the part of participants

Constraints imposed by governments, requiring that goods or services transfer on certain terms even though one or both parties would not freely exchange on those terms, is called ‘intervention in the market’ *Socialism involves collective, political control, rather than market determination, of much economic activity, especially of capital (productive) goods; *capitalism leaves the alloca-tion of capital as well as all consumer goods to private con-trol (ownership) There is extensive political and moral discussion about the proper role of markets in society,

ranging from those who think that the allocation of all

goods and services should be determined by free market mechanisms (*‘libertarianism’) to those who think that

none of them should (‘collectivism’) The latter, which

Stalinism approximated, is defended by no one The for-mer, or close approximations, has many advocates, due in part to its theoretical elegance and in part to the enormous empirical success of markets The chief problem for the unlimited advocacy of market methods is what to do about externalities—involuntary effects (especially nega-tive ones) on persons outside the transaction, as with, say,

an assassination contract; and especially about public goods, which are roughly externalities, such as pollution, whose involuntary costs are imposed on miscellaneous others rather than some few specific others, making

it very difficult to allocate costs and benefits precisely

j.n

*anti-communism

For a fascinating radically pro-market book, see David Friedman,

The Machinery of Freedom, 2nd ed (La Salle, Ill., 1989) For a good,

markets 555

brief discussion of many basics, see Allen Buchanan, Ethics,

Efficiency, and the Market (Totowa, NJ, 1985).

markets and the public good.Markets are places or

net-works where buyers and sellers exchange goods or

ser-vices for money Capitalism is the economic system

whereby the mass production of goods to be sold in

mar-kets is financed by private capital for individual or

corpo-rate profit According to the ‘law’ of supply and demand,

market price rises with the scarcity of items for sale and

falls with their abundance; current price thus provides

sell-ers with information enabling them to distribute their

resources for maximum profit This allows for an efficient

allocation of resources based entirely on decisions of

purchasers and without government or other

inter-vention A market economy also encourages innovation

and individual initiative as incentives for profit Mass

production makes technologically advanced, inexpensive

goods widely available, gradually improving the general

welfare

Yet a market economy benefits most those sufficiently

well-off to buy its products; those with few financial

resources are seriously disadvantaged Those born into

poverty are likely to continue to suffer from economic

deprivation Secondly, unavoidably, there are long

periods of unemployment after a period of economic

con-traction; and market solutions to issues such as inflation,

environmental destruction, and pollution are also

prob-lematic Finally, capitalism distributes wealth very

unevenly, with investors and management highly

rewarded by profits from sales, while workers are limited

to labour for wages often lowered by competition among

labourers for jobs This tends to create a small wealthy

class with great economic power in contrast to a large

number of relatively impoverished, powerless workers

Liberals try to retain the advantages of capitalism by

advocating that government protect basic civil rights but

also provide medical services, education, transportation,

access to positions of power, and a clean, sustainable

environment Guaranteeing broad rights and also a just

distribution of wealth and services is to counterbalance

market inequities

Socialists contend that even under liberal democracy

the wealthy will inevitably have disproportionate

eco-nomic and political power Their solution is to eliminate

or reduce the market system, either gradually through

general education and democratic means or quickly

through revolution An economy with state control of

production and distribution of goods for the benefit of all

will retain the advantages of industrialism without the

M Kelly, The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate

Aristocracy (San Francisco, 2001).

J A Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3 edn.

(New York, 1983)

marriage.Contractual union for the purpose of raising a

family, or, derivatively, for the sex, domestic security, etc

associated with this By contrast with the biological phe-nomenon of mating, marriage is, to taste, ‘made in heaven’ or instituted by human societies The former view offers a theological justification for some particular conception of marriage, e.g as an indissoluble union con-stituting the only permissible locus of sexual activity The latter view emphasizes the variety of forms of marriage, e.g polygamy and polyandry, and typically offers justifi-cations of these in terms of their social function Forms of marriage may thus be criticized as dysfunctional: so Plato regards monogamous marriage carrying parental respon-sibilities as a threat to social solidarity, and he recom-mends instead that wives and children should be shared in common Other criticisms of marriage complain of the restrictions it imposes on individual liberty These may be

met by noting its voluntary contractual character This

reply appears to require that divorce be readily available

to terminate the contract and also, perhaps, that different types of marital contract should be possible Yet an exclu-sive emphasis upon contracts seems unromantic in the face of the contemporary Western insistence that mar-riage is only justified by *love But in view of the notorious mutability of romantic love, we can either reply that mar-riage makes possible a commitment that gives conjugal love its value (e.g Kierkegaard), or conclude that mar-riage is indefensible, creating ‘that moral centaur, man

*sex; Augustine; friendship; sexual conduct

B T Trainor, ‘The State, Marriage and Divorce’, Journal of Applied Philosophy (1992).

Marsilius (Marsiglio) of Padua (c.1280–1342) Italian

medieval political theorist who contested the dominant view of hereditary kingship as the best form of

govern-ment Drawing on Aristotle’s Politics, Cicero (as the

defender of republican liberty), and his experience of

vibrant Italian city states ruled de facto by assemblies,

Mar-silius elaborately argued a theory of popular sovereignty,

opposed to Dante, in Defender of the Peace (1324)

Legisla-tive power most appropriately resides within the lay citi-zen body, which may delegate executive power to an aristocracy or even to a monarch, but which does not thereby lose it Of the three forms of government dis-cussed by Aristotle, monarchy, aristocracy, and the city state or ‘polity’, only the last for Marsilius fully guarantees political *liberty, and the flourishing of justice and peace The two main threats to peace are (1) factionalism and, more serious, (2) the papacy’s demands for supreme sov-ereignty in the secular sphere Marsilius’ arguments were known to fifteenth-century Italian humanist defenders of

A Gewirth, Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of Peace, 2 vols

(New York, 1957)

Q Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols.

(Cambridge, 1980)

Martin, Charles B (1924– ) Professor of Philosophy, University of Calgary, formerly Chair of Philosophy,

556 markets

University of Sydney, past President of the Australasian

Philosophical Association, noted for work in metaphysics

and the philosophy of mind Citing Locke as his

inspir-ation, he was an early proponent of causal theories of

per-ception, knowledge, and memory, and a principal

architect of Australian metaphysical *realism Martin

advocates an uncompromising materialist conception of

minds as complex neurologically based propensities for

the manipulation of sensory materials The ‘ofness’ and

‘aboutness’ of thoughts and images arises from their

dis-positional realizations in the nervous system More

gener-ally, Martin holds that property instances invariably

possess both dispositional and non-dispositional aspects,

and that causal transactions are best regarded, not as

rela-tions between distinct events, but as the ‘mutual

manifest-ations of reciprocal dispositional property partners’

j.heil

*Australian philosophy

D M Armstrong, C B Martin, and U.T Place, Dispositions: A

Debate (London, 1996).

C B Martin, ‘Protolanguage’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy

(1987)

Martineau, James (1805–1900) Leader of the Unitarians

in Victorian England and brother of social critic Harriet

Martineau, Martineau taught at Manchester New

Col-lege, where he eventually served as Principal He was an

intuitionist about morality, and a chapter of Sidgwick’s

Methods of Ethics is devoted to criticism of his views Today

he is best remembered for his advocacy of an agent-based

form of *virtue ethics according to which motives are the

fundamental objects of moral evaluation (with reverence

ranking highest, followed by compassion) and all actions

are to be evaluated derivatively in terms of their relation

to such motives Martineau’s theory is perhaps the

purest example of agent-basing in the entire history of

*agent-relative moralities

J B Schneewind, Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy

(Oxford, 1977), esp ch 7

Marx, Karl Heinrich (1818–83) Radical social theorist and

organizer of the working class, whose thought is widely

regarded as the chief inspiration for all forms of modern

social radicalism Born 5 May 1818 in the Rhenish city of

Trier, Marx was son of a successful Jewish lawyer of

con-servative political views who converted to Christianity in

1824 He studied law at the University of Bonn in 1835 and

at the University of Berlin in 1836, changing his course of

study in that year to philosophy, under the influence of

Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and the Young

Hegelian movement Marx completed his doctorate in

philosophy in 1841 With the accession of Friedrich

Wilhelm IV in 1840, however, the Young Hegelians came

under attack from the government, and Marx lost all

chance of an academic career in philosophy Between

1842 and 1848 he edited radical publications in the

Rhineland, France, and Belgium He married his child-hood sweetheart, Jenny von Westphalen, in 1843; despite their exceedingly hard life after 1850, the marriage was a happy one, and lasted until her death in 1881 (While in London the Marxes’ family servant, Helene Demuth, gave birth to an illegitimate child; during the present cen-tury it was believed for a time that Marx was the father, but it is now widely held that he was not.)

In 1844, while in Paris, Marx was introduced both to the working-class movement and to the study of political economy by his former fellow student at Berlin, Friedrich Engels, with whom he began a lifetime of collaboration While in Brussels, he formulated the programme of his-torical materialism, first expounded in the unpublished

manuscript The German Ideology Marx returned from

Belgium to Paris in 1848 after the revolution, and then went back to the Rhineland where he worked as a publicist on behalf of the insurrection there In the same year Marx and Engels played a key role in founding the Communist

League (which lasted until 1850); the Communist Manifesto

was part of their activity in the League After successfully defending himself and his associates in a Cologne court on charges of inciting to revolt, Marx was expelled from Prussian territories in 1848 After a brief stay in Paris, he took up residence in London The first years in England were a time of bitter, brutal poverty for the Marx family: three of their six children died of want and Marx’s health suffered a collapse from which it never fully recovered For much of the 1850s his only regular income was from

Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, for which he served as

European correspondent, receiving a fee of £1 per article Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, when not confined to bed by illness, Marx regularly spent ten hours of every day

in the library of the British Museum studying and writing

His first scientific work on political economy, Contribution

to a Critique of Political Economy, was published in 1859; the

Preface to this work contains a succinct statement of the materialist conception of history, usually regarded as the definitive formulation of that doctrine This was only

a prelude to Marx’s definitive theory of *capitalism

Vol-ume i of Capital was published in 1867, but two more

vol-umes were left uncompleted at his death Engels edited and published them in 1884 and 1893 respectively Marx was instrumental in founding the International Working Men’s Association in 1864, and guided it through six con-gresses in nine years The demise of the First International

in 1876 was brought about by a combination of factors, notably the organization’s support for the Paris

Com-mune (see Marx’s The Civil War in France) and internal

intrigues by Mikhail Bakunin (expelled in 1872) Marx died of long-standing respiratory ailments on 13 March

1883, and is buried next to his wife in Highgate Cemetery, London

Marx’s interest in philosophical *materialism is evident

as early as his doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of nature in Democritus and Epicurus But the dissertation’s focus on Epicurus’ philosophy of self-consciousness and its historical significance equally displays Marx’s

Marx, Karl 557

education in German idealist philosophy and his

preoccu-pation with its themes As a philosopher Marx

self-consciously sought to marry the tradition of German

*idealism, especially the philosophy of Hegel, with the

scientific materialism of the radical French

Enlighten-ment This was to some extent the tendency of the Young

Hegelian movement generally, but Marx’s emphatic

admiration for English and French materialism in contrast

to the Young Hegelians’ depreciation of it is displayed in a

well-known passage from The Holy Family (1844).

Of greater significance for Marx’s later thought is the

way in which his famous Paris manuscripts of 1844

address to the ‘materialistic’ science of political economy

a set of issues which Hegel and his followers had treated as

questions of religious subjectivity German idealism was

concerned with problems of human selfhood, the nature

of a fulfilling human life, and people’s sense of meaning,

self-worth, and relatedness to their natural and social

environment They saw modern culture as both a scene of

*‘alienation’ for human beings from themselves, their

lives, and others, and also as holding out the promise of

the conquest or overcoming of alienation Hegel,

how-ever, saw the task of self-fulfilment and reconciliation as a

philosophical–religious one It was Marx in the Paris

man-uscripts who first attempted to see it as fundamentally a

matter of the social and economic conditions in which

people live, of the kind of labouring activities they

per-form and the practical relationships in which they stand to

one another Marx’s concern for the plight of the working

class was from the beginning a concern not merely with

the satisfaction of ‘material needs’ in the usual sense, but

fundamentally with the conditions under which human

beings can develop their ‘essential human powers’ and

attain ‘free self-activity’

The Paris manuscripts view human beings in modern

society, human beings as they are understood by the

sci-ence of political economy, as alienated from themselves

because their life-activity takes an alien, inhuman form

Truly human and fulfilling life activity is an activity of free

social expression It is free because it is

self-determined by human beings themselves; it develops and

expresses their humanity because, as Hegel had realized, it

is the nature of a spiritual being to create itself by

objecti-fying itself in a world and then comprehending that world

as its adequate expression, as the ‘affirmation’,

‘objectifi-cation’, and ‘confirmation’ of its nature; and it is social

because it is the nature of human beings to produce both

with others and for others, and to understand themselves

in the light of their mutual recognition of one another and

their common work The social relationships depicted by

political economy, however, are relationships in which

the life-activity of the majority, the working class, is

increasingly stunted, reduced to meaningless physical

activity which, far from developing and exercising their

humanity, reduces them to abstract organs of a lifeless

mechanism They do not experience the products of their

labour as their expression, or indeed as theirs in any sense

For these products belong to a non-worker, the capitalist,

to whom they must sell their activity for a wage which suf-fices only to keep them alive so that they may sustain the whole absurd cycle of their lives Political economy, moreover, depicts human beings whose social life and relationships are at the mercy not of their collective choice but of an alien, inhuman mechanism, the market-place, which purports to be a sphere of individual freedom, but is

in fact a sphere of collective slavery to inhuman and destructive forces

Hegel had earlier conceived of alienation in the form of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ (a misunderstood Christian religiosity which experiences the human self as empty and worthless, and places everything valuable in a super-natural ‘beyond’) The cure for alienation in Hegel’s view

is the recognition that finite nature is not the absence of infinite spirit but its expression Feuerbach brought to light the latent *humanism in Hegel’s view and attacked all forms of religion (and even Hegel’s speculative meta-physics) as forms of alienation The true being of human individuals, he maintained, is in the enjoyment of sensu-ous nature and of loving harmony with other human beings What both Hegel and Feuerbach had in common

is the perception of alienation as fundamentally a form of false consciousness, whose cure was a correct perception

or interpretation of the world Alienated consciousness contains both a lament that our natural human life is unsatisfying and worthless, and also the hope of consol-ation in the beyond Hegel and Feuerbach agree that the illusion of alienated consciousness consists in its negative attitude toward earthly life; the comforting assurances of religion, according to both philosophers, contain the truth, if only we know how to put the right philosophical interpretation on them To Marx, however, alienation becomes intelligible as soon as we adopt just the reverse supposition: that the alienated consciousness tells the truth in its laments, not in its consolations Religion, according to Marx, gives expression to a mode of life which is really empty, unfulfilled, degraded, devoid of dig-nity Religious illusions have hold on us because they pro-vide a false semblance of meaning and fulfilment for a mode of life which without this illusion would be seen for the unredeemed meaninglessness that it is For Marx reli-gious misery is both an expression of actual misery and an attempt to flee from it into a world of imagination: it is the

‘opium of the people’ The way out of alienation is not, as Hegel and Feuerbach thought, a new philosophical inter-pretation of life, but a new form of earthly existence, a new society in which the material conditions for a fulfill-ing human life would no longer be lackfulfill-ing ‘The

philoso-phers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it.’

For Marx the ultimate tendency of history is the Promethean drive of the human species to develop its

‘essential human powers’, its powers of production Under capitalism these powers, and the complex network

of human co-operation through which they are exercised, have for the first time grown far enough to put within the reach of human beings themselves the collective, rational

558 Marx, Karl

control of the social form of their own production This

self-conscious self-determination is the true meaning of

human freedom But human beings under capitalism are

alienated because capitalist social relations, by

dispossess-ing the vast majority of producers and subjectdispossess-ing the form

of social production to the market mechanism, frustrate

this collective self-determination The historic mission of

the proletariat is to actualize the capacities for human

free-dom which the capitalist mode of production has put

within our reach, by abolishing class society In this way,

historical materialism gives the working class a full

con-scious understanding of its historic mission, so that unlike

previous ruling classes it may fulfil this mission

con-sciously, and thus truly enable the human species to

mas-ter itself and its destiny The mamas-terialist conception of

history thus serves as the link between Marx’s concern

with the conditions for human fulfilment, his theoretical

enterprise as economist and historian, and his practical

activity as a working-class organizer and revolutionary

According to Marx’s materialist conception of history,

the goals of a class movement are determined by the set of

production relations the class is in a position to establish

and defend This implies that historically conscious

revo-lutionaries should not proceed by setting utopian goals for

themselves and then looking around for means to achieve

them Revolutionary practice is rather a matter of

partici-pating in an already developing class movement, helping

to define its own goals and to actualize them through the

use of the weapons inherent in the class’s historical

situ-ation The definition of these goals, moreover, is an

ongo-ing process; thus it is pointless to speculate about the

precise system of distribution which a revolutionary

movement will institute after its victory when the

move-ment itself is still in its infancy

Marx believed that future society would see the

aboli-tion of classes, of private ownership of means of

produc-tion, and even of commodity production (production of

goods and services for exchange or sale) He believed

communist society would eventually eliminate all

sys-tematic social causes of alienation and human

unfulfil-ment Yet he never thought of future society as an

unchanging state of perfection On the contrary, he

thought of the end of class society as the true beginning of

human history, of the historical development of human

society directed consciously by human beings Above all,

Marx never attempted to ‘write recipes for the cookshops

of the future’ or to say in any detail what distribution

rela-tions in future socialist or communist society would be

like He equally scorned those who concerned themselves

with formulating principles of distributive justice and

con-demning capitalism in their name Marx conceives the

justice of economic transactions as their correspondence

to or functionality for the prevailing mode of production

Given this conception of justice, Marx very consistently (if

rather surprisingly) concluded that the inhuman

exploit-ation practised by capitalism against the workers is not

unjust, and does not violate the workers’ rights; this

con-clusion constitutes no defence of capitalism, only an

attack on the use of moral conceptions within the prole-tarian movement Marx saw the task of the proleprole-tarian movement in his time as one of self-definition and growth through organization, discipline, and self-criticism based

on scientific self-understanding He left for later stages of the movement the task of planning the future society which it is the historic mission of the movement to bring

*anti-communism; Marxist philosophy

Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, 4th edn.

(Oxford, 1978)

Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, 2 vols (New York,

1977–8)

David McLellan, The Thought of Karl Marx, 2nd edn (London,

1980)

Richard Miller, Analyzing Marx (Princeton, NJ, 1984).

Paul Walton and Andrew Gamble, From Alienation to Surplus Value, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1972).

Allen Wood, Karl Marx (London, 1981).

Marxism after communism. Eastern European and Soviet communism as a political system collapsed after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 Marxism understood as the philosophical basis of this system collapsed at the same time Whether or not a philosophy can be taken as refuted

by a political system’s defeat in a kind of war, something like this has been accepted Leninist Marxism (one-party rule in the name of the working class) and Stalinist Marx-ism (the ‘planned economy’ and ‘socialMarx-ism in one coun-try’) have all but vanished Elements of this conjuncture of theory with practice were preserved in Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, and China Elsewhere Marxism survives as a politically engaged philosophy

Marxism after communism is grounded in concepts of human social activity In particular it is concerned with historical stages of technological development and criti-cisms of contemporary capitalism Marxism thus presents many political issues as philosophical problems, and embraces many concepts that belong to history and eco-nomics In Marxism many traditional problems in moral philosophy, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind, for instance, get little attention The problems addressed by Marxism as a social philosophy are economic exploitation, distributive inequalities, social class, and political change This makes it a form of ‘critical theory’

Marxism offers philosophically based criticisms of the capitalist economic system, and of the linkage between liberal democracy and commercial interests It currently presents very little in the way of utopian thinking about communism, even as a philosophical ideal Instead it has broadened Marx’s central notion of class struggle to include a wider variety of human differences and broader movements in identity politics This gives an economic slant to nationalist and gender conflict, for example, par-ticularly when conceptualized with respect to inter-national capitalism

For some philosophers Marxism is still a ‘grand theory’ searching for directionality in human history, and for

Marxism after communism 559