Meinong, just like another student of Brentano’s, Edmund Husserl, realizes that one must distinguish between the *content of a mental act, on the one hand, and the intention or object of
Trang 1avicenna is the Latinized name by which the Persian Ibn
Sina is known in the West; he was the most brilliant of the
Islamic Aristotelians and a leading figure in the vigorous
debate which accompanied the development of Islamic
philosophy and theology in the fifth century after
Muhammad
thomas aquinas, born and educated in southern Italy, became the greatest teacher of the Dominican monastic order In the mid-thirteenth century he developed Aristotle’s legacy into an exhaustive, rigorously argued philosophical and theological system
roger bacon was the first great Oxford philosopher; he
enlisted scientific method in philosophical and theological
enquiry
duns scotus was called Doctor Subtilis for his subtle re-conciliation of Aristotelian philosophy with the doctrines of the Franciscan monastic tradition
medieval philosophy
Trang 2who held that the eternity of the world was neither
prov-able nor disprovprov-able His teacher, Albert the Great, held,
to the contrary, that Aristotle’s position on this matter was
false, and that the doctrine that the world had a beginning
in time could be demonstrated
There is a common belief that the problem of
*univer-sals is the philosophical problem of the Middle Ages It
should be said that that belief, in any case exaggerated,
does not address the fact that the problem of universals is
not one problem but a large cluster of problems And
indeed problems about universals have always been
centre-stage in the history of philosophy; and universals
are as much an issue now as they have ever been
Never-theless, the fact remains that a philosopher’s position on
whether certain entities were mind-independent (in
which case they had real existence, the solution of
‘realists’) or were mind-dependent (in which case they had
nominal existence, the solution of ‘nominalists’) entered
into the interstices of many debates
One problem concerning universals was this: granted
that several individual things have a common nature as a
result of which they are members of the same species,
what is the mode of existence of this common nature?
Does it exist in the individuals that have the nature?
Those, for example Wyclif, who replied affirmatively are
realists But there are difficulties associated with this
pos-ition For example, if the universal doghood, which must
be in an animal if the animal is a dog, is in fact in a given
animal, then how can it also be in another animal? Must
the universal be divided in two for it to be in a second
mal? If so then it surely follows that since each of these
ani-mals has only half the universal in it, each must be only
half a dog—which is an absurd conclusion Realists had a
problem explaining how a universal can really be in many
things at once Yet they must say that a universal can be in
many things at once, for if it cannot, then it cannot be
uni-versal The chief alternative proposal to realism is this,
that a universal is the concept that we form under which
we can bring all the things in that species, as the
nominal-ists (or conceptualnominal-ists) such as Ockham thought On this
account the universality of a universal lies in the fact that
the concept thus formed is equally predicable of many
things There is a direct line of descent to Ockham’s
pos-ition from that of Abelard, who argued famously that
common natures are really utterances (voces) or mental
entities For both Abelard and Ockham the doctrine of
universals had a central role in the theory of predication
A version of the debate between realists and
nominal-ists was conducted in the Middle Ages in connection with
the existence of values Does God command us to
per-form acts of a given kind because they are in any case
good, or is their goodness caused by the fact of God’s
com-manding them? (*Euthyphro problem.) An affirmative
answer to the first question implies a realist position,
namely that values have a real existence independently of
God’s will, whereas an affirmative reply to the second
question implies a nominalist position, namely that values
owe their existence to an act of divine will This latter
doc-trine, known as voluntarism, was associated, though inaccurately, with Duns Scotus Secular versions of not only this, but also many other medieval debates, constitute
a large part of the philosophical scene today a.bro
*Aristotelianism
A J P Kenny, Medieval Philosophy (Oxford, 2005).
D Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought, 2nd edn (London,
1988)
N Kretzmann et al (eds.), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1998).
A S McGrade (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philoso-phy (Cambridge, 2003).
Megarics (4th century bc) The Megarics scorned ana-logical reasoning (‘If it’s from like to like, one should con-sider the things themselves, rather than those like them; if it’s from unlike to unlike, the comparison is pointless’), modalities (‘Only the actual is possible; e.g someone who isn’t building cannot build’), and predication (‘If we predi-cate to run of a horse, subject and predipredi-cate differ Since they differ, it’s wrong to say that a horse runs’; ‘What I’m pointing to isn’t cabbage For cabbage existed ages ago So this isn’t cabbage’) So how could wisdom, God, and intel-lect all be, as the Megarics insisted, good? Simple: they were ‘one thing, with many names’
In ancient times, ‘Megaric’ was applied only to the school founded by Euclides of Megara in Greece Much modern scholarship perversely applies the term to others
Gabriele Giannantoni (ed.), Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae (Naples, 1990), i 375–483 (= Elenchos, vol xviii*).
Meinong, Alexius (1853–1920) is one of the most mis-understood and reviled philosophers of recent times According to a prevalent view, he was a spendthrift meta-physician who delighted in multiplying entities continu-ously and needlessly Gilbert Ryle, for example, speaks of him as the ‘supreme entity-multiplier in the history of philosophy’ Meinong’s fatal mistake allegedly consisted
in mistaking the meanings of words for objects With this distorted perspective, his importance derives entirely from the fact that he forced Russell, Wittgenstein, Ryle, and later English philosophers to realize that *meanings are not objects But this conception of Meinong’s phil-osophical importance is quite mistaken
Meinong attended the University of Vienna in the fall
of 1870 and graduated in the summer of 1874 with history
as his major In the fall of the same year, he entered the law school of the University of Vienna Soon afterwards, under the guidance of Franz Brentano, he turned to phil-osophy In his autobiographical notes, Meinong states that he may have jealously guarded his independence of the forceful personality of Brentano, and that this may have caused misunderstandings between him and his teacher ‘But what in life could not be laid to rest’, he con-cludes, ‘in death has been reconciled; and before the inner eye of my memory, there stands once again, as a treasure
I shall never lose, my admired teacher, a figure of spiritual
Meinong, Alexius 581
Trang 3beauty, bathed in the golden sunshine of the summer of
his own and my youth.’ From 1878 until 1882, Meinong
was Privatdozent at the University of Vienna Then he
was appointed Extraordinarius of philosophy at the
Uni-versity of Graz, and, later, Ordinarius He lived and
worked for the rest of his life in Graz The following story,
I think, is characteristic of his way of life When he was
repeatedly urged to take a vacation, he finally and very
reluctantly consented He packed a suitcase and moved
from his house in Graz to a hotel a few blocks away, where
he stayed for two weeks and undoubtedly worked on his
philosophy, before he returned to his home!
To understand Meinong’s philosophy, it is necessary to
see how it develops step by step over many years from an
idealistic (Berkeleian) and most austere beginning into a
realistic and ample philosophical system In his earliest
publications, the Hume Studien I (1877) and II (1882),
Meinong deals with two thoroughly traditional
philo-sophical problems, the problem of *universals and the
problem of *relations In Hume Studien I, Meinong adopts
a Berkeleian ontology An ordinary perceptual object, like
Berkeley’s apple, is conceived of as a complex of property
instances: a certain colour instance, associated with a
cer-tain shape instance, associated with a cercer-tain taste
instance, etc These *property instances (*individual
prop-erties, *abstract individuals), in turn, are associated with a
place and a moment A complex is individuated, according
to Meinong, by these places and moments The property
instances themselves are both particular and universal: if
they are viewed, through acts of abstraction, in isolation
from the places and moments, they are universal; if
viewed as associated with places and moments, they are
particular This is Meinong’s early solution of the
nomin-alism–realism problem Finally, all of these complexes of
property instances are identified, in Berkeley’s fashion,
with complex presentations, that is with mental entities
This view calls for a closer inspection of the relations
required by an ontology of complexes This is the topic of
Hume Studien II Here Meinong discusses the three
rela-tions involved in complexes Firstly, there is the relation of
equality among instances which guarantees that property
instances can be grouped in the required way Where a
realist speaks of two things as sharing the same property,
Meinong speaks of two numerically different but equal
property instances Secondly, there is the relation of
asso-ciation which binds the various instances together into a
complex And thirdly, there is the part–whole relation
between an instance and the complex to which it belongs
This relation corresponds in Meinong’s scheme of things
to predication The great achievement of the Hume Studien
II consists in Meinong’s eventual recognition that there
are mind-independent relations Like Frege and Russell,
he thus breaks with a long philosophical tradition,
accord-ing to which relations are merely the creations of mental
acts of comparison
But even in the Hume Studien II, we find the pervasive
idealistic confusion between presentations (*ideas) and
their objects However, this confusion does not last long
Meinong, just like another student of Brentano’s, Edmund Husserl, realizes that one must distinguish between the *content of a mental act, on the one hand, and the intention or object of the act, on the other And just as it does for Husserl, who discovers *phenomen-ology, this distinction eventually opens up for Meinong a new field of philosophical inquiry, namely, his so-called theory of objects
In 1894 there appeared a rather slim book by Kasimir Twardowski, another student of Brentano’s, which
greatly influenced the course of philosophy: On the Content and Object of Presentations (tr R Grossmann (The Hague,
1977) ) In this book, Twardowski argued that the object of
a mental act is not ‘immanent’ in the act, that is, is not a part of the act He therefore distinguished between the individual mental act, its content, and its object Even more importantly, Twardowski argued that the question whether or not an act has an object must be sharply distin-guished from the question whether or not the object exists And he held that even though every mental act has
an object or intention, many of these objects do not exist
at all Meinong adopts Twardowski’s distinction as well as his contention that there are many objects (of acts) which
do not exist By adopting Twardowski’s view, Meinong breaks out of the idealistic prison: a presentation, as a men-tal act with a content, can now be clearly separated from the object which it intends
At about the same time, 1899, Meinong also realizes that his implicit *ontology is much richer than the explicit one consisting of nothing but property instances bined with places and moments It comprises also com-plexes of property instances (or properties) and relations With this realization, Meinong’s eyes are opened to his own and other philosopher’s ontological commitments From now on, Meinong’s philosophical inquiries are pri-marily ontological inquiries
Meinong’s most famous book is called On Assumptions (Über Annahmen) The first edition appeared in 1902; the
second and more important one in 1910 The topic indi-cated by its title hardly warrants its fame The discovery of one more kind of mental act is not the most exciting thing
in philosophy But the title is misleading What Meinong really discovers, and finally fully appreciates in the second edition, is the *category of states of affairs, what he calls
‘Objektives’ With the discovery of the category of states
of affairs as the intentions of judgements and assumptions, Meinong, just like Husserl, breaks decisively with Brentano’s philosophy, according to which only individ-ual things exist
But Meinong’s fame, unfortunately, does not rest on this epochal ontological discovery—think of Wittgen-stein’s later pronouncement that the world is a collection
of facts, not of things—but on Meinong’s view about intentional objects and their properties
Like many recent philosophers, Meinong distinguished between two modes of *being Let us call them existence and subsistence Things that are located in space and/or time are said to exist Things which are not in space and
582 Meinong, Alexius
Trang 4time subsist For example, individual things exist; the
rela-tion of equality between property instances, on the other
hand, subsists Now, it is clear that there are intentional
objects before a mind which neither exist nor subsist, for
example, the golden mountain of which someone may be
thinking And this raises the important question whether
this intentional object has perhaps a third mode of being
The most important argument that speaks for such a
fur-ther mode of being starts from the fact that fur-there subsists,
according to Meinong, the fact (objective) that the golden
mountain does not exist If one assumes that something
can only be a constituent of a fact if it has some sort of
being, then it follows immediately that the golden
moun-tain must have being of some sort Or else, it seems, one
must reject this principle and assume that something can
be a constituent of a fact even if it has no being at all
Meinong discusses this issue extensively and arrives at the
conclusion that the principle must be rejected Of course,
one can escape from the apparent dilemma in Russell’s
way, namely, by showing that the golden mountain is not
a constituent of the fact that the golden mountain does not
exist Meinong does not take this way out But, contrary to
a common misunderstanding, he does not hold that the
golden mountain has some kind of being
However, Meinong does hold a view that is highly
sus-pect, namely the view that the golden mountain, even
though it has no being, is nevertheless golden and a
moun-tain Things without being, in short, are held to have
cer-tain quite ordinary properties I think that it is this view
which is most characteristic of Meinong’s metaphysics
And it is this view which leads him to claim that there is a
whole field of inquiry which has been neglected by
philoso-phy, namely, the so-called theory of objects The golden
mountain, for example, is an intentional object of the
mind Now, if it has no properties, as one is apt to assume,
then there can be no theory about it, no informative truths
would be forthcoming Only if one assumes, as Meinong
does, that such intentional objects have a number of
prop-erties, can there be knowledge about them
In a review (Mind (1905) ) of one of Meinong’s works,
Bertrand Russell raises two objections against Meinong’s
claim that non-existent objects have common properties
Firstly, Russell objects that if impossible objects, like the
round square, really had the properties Meinong
attrib-utes to them, like being both round and square, then such
objects would violate the law of contradiction Meinong,
in reply, readily admits that this is the case, but points out
that nobody has ever tried to apply this law to anything
but the actual or possible (Über die Stellung der
Gegenständ-stheorie im System der Wissenschaften (Leipzig, 1907) )
Con-tradictory things, in other words, quite obviously must
violate the law of contradiction or they would not be what
they are Perhaps Russell thought that his objection had
some force because he thought of logic, at that time, not
just as applying to what there is, but as encompassing
everything
Russell’s second objection, however, is to the point,
and Meinong devotes several paragraphs to it If the round
square is really round and square, then the existing round square, according to Russell, must also exist But this is absurd The round square does not exist Meinong tries to escape from this objection by distinguishing between ordinary existence and the ‘existential determination’ to
be existing The latter, he claims, behaves like an ordinary property in that just as the golden mountain is golden, so the existing golden mountain has the existential determin-ation of being existing It follows that the existing golden mountain is existing, but it does not exist In a letter to Meinong, Russell replies that he cannot see how one can distinguish between ‘to exist’ and ‘to be existing’
It may be thought that Meinong could have avoided Russell’s objection without the dubious distinction between existence and to be existing by claiming that existence is not a property like being made from gold or being a mountain While it is true that the golden moun-tain is golden and the round square is round, it is not the case that the existing golden mountain exists, since existence is not a property In a way, Meinong makes this move He holds that while the golden mountain is golden, the existing golden mountain does not exist But then he adds the so-called existential determination to
be existing, and this addition seems merely to cloud the issue Why does Meinong think that there is a property which somehow corresponds to existence without being existence? An answer follows from Meinong’s accept-ance of the so-called principle of unlimited freedom of assumption, according to which one can think not only of
a round square, but even of an existing round square Clearly, to think of an existing round square is not the same as to think of a round square Therefore, the objects before the mind must be different in these two cases Meinong has to introduce the existential determination in order to distinguish the one intentional object from the other
In view of these and other difficulties, why is Meinong
so convinced that the golden mountain is made from gold and that the round square is both round and square? Surely, this view is rather implausible, to say the least I think that he may have been misled by his conception of individual objects as complexes of property instances (or
of properties) The complex object which is the golden mountain must obviously consist, among other things, of the property of being golden Now, if inclusion in a com-plex is conceived of as predication, then it follows imme-diately that the complex which is the golden mountain, since it contains the property of being golden, must be golden Hence one arrives at the view that every complex,
no matter what its ontological status may be, must have the properties which constitute it r.g
Meinong’s works have been collected in a Gesamtausgabe, 7 vols.
(Graz, 1968–78) Some of them have been translated into English, e.g ‘Über Gegenstandstheorie’, tr I Levi as ‘The Theory of
Objects’, in R M Chisholm (ed.), Realism and the Background of Phenomenology (New York, 1960); also Über Annahmen, 2nd edn.,
tr J Heanue as On Assumptions (Berkeley, Calif., 1983) Books
about Meinong’s philosophy:
Meinong, Alexius 583
Trang 5J N Findlay, Meinong’s Theory of Objects and Values (Oxford, 1963).
R Grossmann, Meinong (London, 1974).
Richard Routley, Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond (Canberra,
1980)
Melissus( fl c.440bc) Metaphysician of the Eleatic group
(he also had success as a naval commander) While the
ground-plan of his philosophical treatise seems to have
followed that of Parmenides, he diverged in significant
ways He freely applied spatial and temporal predicates to
his reality, suggesting that it stood closer to the world of
ordinary experience Yet his criticism of sense-perception
was much more radical than that of Parmenides: he
argued not merely that it is not a means to knowledge, but
that it is necessarily illusory e.l.h
*Eleatics
G S Kirk, J E Raven, and M Schofield, The Presocratic
Philoso-phers, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1983), 390–401.
Mellor, D H (1938– ) British metaphysician and
philoso-pher of science, noted for his work on chance and
prob-ability, dispositional properties and laws of nature, the
problem of induction, and the philosophy of *time
Mellor rejects the dynamic view of time which regards
temporal becoming as an objectively real phenomenon
He denies that there are any tensed facts (that is, facts
involving pastness or futurity), while conceding that
tensed beliefs are not translatable into tenseless beliefs and
are indispensable for practical reason and action
Accord-ing to Mellor it is tenseless facts which make tensed beliefs
true, the key to this possibility being the indexical
charac-ter of tensed expressions like ‘now’ and ‘yescharac-terday’ He
endorses McTaggart’s argument that tensed language,
construed purely realistically, leads to contradiction
Unusually for an adherent of the tenseless view of time,
Mellor rejects the doctrine of temporal parts, which holds
that persisting objects consist of spatio-temporally
continu-ous and causally connected stages or time-slices Mellor
extends his approach to indexical language to first-person
expressions like ‘I’, as part of an overall metaphysical view
which is naturalistic and scientifically informed and yet
sceptical of physicalist and reductionist dogmas
Mellor’s approach to issues concerning belief and
action, probability and induction, and causality and
nat-ural law follows recognizably in the Cambridge tradition
of F P Ramsey and Richard Braithwaite, whose work he
has done much to promote His Cambridge inaugural
lec-ture, ‘The Warrant of Induction’ (1988), provides new
insight into the solution of an old problem by setting it
within the context of an externalist approach to
know-ledge and warranted belief This, along with his defence of
dispositions and of objective chance in terms of
*propen-sities, marks him off as a metaphysical realist well able to
counter the subjectivist and relativist leanings of many
other leading philosophers of science e.j.l
D H Mellor, Real Time (Cambridge, 1981).
—— Matters of Metaphysics (Cambridge, 1991).
memory.To have a good memory is to be able to remem-ber many things, accurately and easily But what is it to remember anything at all? Evidently the past comes in somehow A creature with no past, assuming such a crea-ture is possible, would have no memories, even if it had some innate knowledge of facts about the past, or vivid and unexplainably accurate images of past events; this fol-lows simply from the logic of the words ‘memory’ and
‘remember’ What one remembers may refer to, though it cannot be in, the future: one can remember that one will die, but not one’s own death But perhaps one can only remember what one previously knew? Certainly this will not be sufficient; a teacher who forgets the things he taught and relearns them later from his pupils is not remembering, even though he not only previously knew
what he now knows but only knows it now because he
knew it previously A pure causal theory of remembering, then, whereby to remember something is to have known
it in the past and to be caused by this to know it now, is not enough Perhaps one cannot remember a fact without having previously known it, but if I remember to turn the gas out I need only have previously intended to turn it out—I need not have known something; but the previous intention must not be completely irrelevant to my present condition Some link then is needed, and though caus-ation may not be enough, if we abandon it what can replace it? But if we keep it what form can it take? Perhaps
that of some trace in the brain (but see Bursen, Dismantling the Memory Machine)?
Memory, especially of past events which we not only previously knew about but experienced, often seems to involve images: in trying to remember something we think we succeed if we can form an *image of it But how can we distinguish remembering it from imagining it? No property intrinsic to the image itself will do, even if we could find one that belonged to all and only memories (of the relevant kind), for how could such a property tell us that something outside the image (the event in question) was real and not imaginary? It is true that a memory may suddenly come upon us in the form of an image, but it is not the image’s vividness that makes it a memory, and when we try to remember something we are not looking for an image to tell us about the past, for how would we know what to look for? Rather we must already know what happened in order to create the image, or vet those images that come before us To remember an event (as opposed to remembering the fact that it occurred) we must have experienced it, and so perhaps remembering it involves remembering our experiencing of it, which involves somehow reproducing it, and how could we reproduce it except by an image? This may be where images are important for memory, but the image still need not constitute the memory It will probably be both inaccurate and incomplete, and I may know this The most we can say seems to be that remembering an experience must include having some sort of an image which can be regarded as corresponding to it to some degree
584 Meinong, Alexius
Trang 6As the above illustrates, memory is of various kinds As
well as facts, events, people, places, and experiences, one
can remember how things looked, where to find them,
what to do with them, to do something, and also how to
do it; this last (remembering how) has sometimes been
singled out for special contrast with another kind
involv-ing images (Bergson, Russell), but without much
justifica-tion, one might think (see Holland, ‘The Empiricist
*quasi-memory; mnemic causation
H A Bursen, Dismantling the Memory Machine (Dordrecht, 1978).
R F Holland, ‘The Empiricist Theory of Memory’, Mind (1954);
repr in S Hampshire (ed.), Philosophy of Mind (New York,
1966) Includes discussion of images
E F Zemach, ‘A Definition of Memory’, Mind (1968) (the
mis-printed reference to Urmson on p 535 should be to Mind
(1967); Urmson replies in Mind (1971) ).
Mencius (4th century bc) Confucian thinker in China
probably best known for his view that human nature is
good His full name was Meng K’o and he was also known
as Meng Tzu˘ (Master Meng), latinized as Mencius He
defended the ethical and political ideal of Confucius
against challenges from rival schools of thought, and his
teachings are recorded in the Meng Tzu˘, a collection of his
sayings and conversations with disciples, friends, rulers,
and philosophical adversaries According to him, all
human beings share certain ethical predispositions such as
an affective concern for others, a sense of shame, love for
parents, and respect for elders The Confucian ideal is a
full realization of such predispositions, and self-cultivation
involves nurturing them to make possible their full
Mencius, tr D C Lau (Harmondsworth, 1970).
Mendelssohn, Moses (1729–86) Jewish *Enlightenment
philosopher, a Leibnizian who admired Spinoza and
Maimonides, and was the model for Nathan the Wise in
Lessing’s play of that name Supplementing his Hebrew
education by learning High German, Latin, Greek,
French, and English, Mendelssohn won the Berlin
compe-tition (1764) in which Kant took honourable mention His
defence of immortality (Phaedon (1776) ) won him fame.
His Jerusalem (1783) brilliantly exposes as incoherent the
idea of spiritual authority His German Pentateuch
anchored the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) His vision
of humanity’s vocation to unending progress profoundly
influenced Kant, who became his lifelong friend
Mendelssohn is credited with distinguishing beauty from
metaphysical perfection, arguing that the latter is unity in
multiplicity, known in its purity only to God; the former is
a human substitute based on our introducing an artificial
uniformity into those objects we perceive as wholes
Man-aging a silk firm and forced by Christian controversialists
into extended defences of his loyalty to Judaism,
Mendelssohn lost his health, but campaigned heroically
against the civil disabilities imposed on Jews, especially
the invidious requirements regarding oaths His son, a
banker, raised his son Felix as a Christian, composer of the
Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn (Philadelphia, 1973).
Meno’s puzzle: see learning paradox.
men’s rights: see masculism.
mental acts: see acts, mental.
mental causation It is a prevalent view that mental events or states, e.g desires and beliefs, contribute causally to the bodily movements involved in action Descartes, holding that mental states are non-material, thought the point of interaction was the pineal gland
As against this, it is often held nowadays that the notion
of non-physical interference is incoherent, since the phys-ical world is a closed system So Davidson, working with this assumption, has argued that in order for mental states
to produce their physical effects they must themselves be physical
However, dissatisfaction with Davidson’s theory arises from three points: (i) Davidson denies the existence of strict *psychophysical laws, (ii) mental states, even if phys-ical, have mental properties, and (iii) mental states explain action in virtue of their mental properties, which should therefore be assigned a causal role The objection is that Davidson cannot do justice to this last requirement because of (i), and much current debate has turned on the task of trying to resolve this issue
Some reject (i), holding that there are psychophysical
laws, albeit with ceteris paribus clauses attached (Fodor)—
a view that is challenged by Schiffer Crane and Mellor reject the physicalist closed-system assumption, arguing that psycho-physical laws are every bit as genuine as the laws of physics An alternative position (Honderich) holds
a *union theory according to which mental and neural states operate together as a pair in causal transactions Dretske has a structural-cause theory: he fixes on the mental as a representational property of beliefs and holds that it operates, not as the neural event which triggers an appropriate bodily movement, but as the structuring cause which contributes to the setting-up of appropriate neural-event→bodily-movement connections Mental causation remains very much a subject of live debate
o.r.j
*volition; will
Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1980) John Heil and Alfred Mele (eds.), Mental Causation (Oxford, 1993).
mental events.Deciding what counts as a mental event is not easy The efficacy of tests like the event’s being imma-terial, subjective, private, or incorrigibly known have been hotly disputed A *privileged-access criterion seems best for sensations, but not for acquiring intentions, beliefs, or desires Brentano’s criterion of intentionality fares better here This test requires that certain implica-tions of existence or identity do not follow from
mental events 585
Trang 7attribution of mental events Falling into Lake Wobegone
implies that it exists, but forming an intention to find Lake
Wobegone does not (nor that it doesn’t) Again, hitting Ali
implies that I hit Clay (Clay and Ali are identical), not so if
I acquire a desire to hit Ali (I might be unaware of the
iden-tity) Thus falling and hitting are not mental events;
acquiring intentions and desires are
Having an intention (contrast forming one), or having a
belief (contrast acquiring one) are reckoned to be *mental
states rather than events, but if the above-mentioned
cri-teria are good for mental events they are good equally for
*dualism; functionalism; materialism; physicalism
Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1980).
mental indispensability The claim of mental
indispens-ability or mental efficacy is that reference to mental events
is an essential part of any correct full explanation of
behav-iour and of the occurrence of other mental events It has
seemed plausible to take the contribution of mental
events to be causal In which case, the claim that the
men-tal is indispensable is a recognition of its causal efficacy and
is a denial of *epiphenomenalism p.j.p.n
*mental causation
T Honderich, A Theory of Determinism (Oxford, 1988), ch 2.
mentality.The attribute of having a mind, but what are
minds? As many use the word, the *mind is the apparatus
or mechanism or inner works which explains how humans
are capable of such things as action, rationality, emotion,
perception, and imagination In that sense it has been
dis-covered to be (roughly) the brain or central nervous
sys-tem, and the remarkable properties of this mind–brain
have become the target for the most exciting research
pro-jects of our time Others use the word as a shorthand way
of talking of those capacities and features which qualify us as
distinctively human Thus there are conceptual debates
about the nature and relative importance of rationality,
agency, free will, consciousness, social awareness,
cap-acity for abstract thought, and so on These are elucidations
of and suggestions about everyday notions which
devel-oped from social interactions in response to practical
needs and interests If listing these qualities gives what
makes us human, thereby revealing our mentality, it is not
the sense in which brain researchers investigate the
men-tal, for they are interested in what makes us human in a
causal or theoretical way Our everyday minds are what
they seek to explain by their interesting discoveries about
the scientific mind
In the theoretical or scientific sense, most of us know
very little about minds But in the descriptive or everyday
sense, we all know a great deal about them, including and
especially our own Philosophy sometimes just articulates
an unwarranted fear of drowning when it seeks to put
limits on what brain research could show, but some of its
warnings may be salutary Successive and transient
inter-nal models of the scientific mind have been based on
available technology, such as clocks, hydraulic robots, telephone exchanges, *computers, and *programs It is fair criticism to point out when these fall short of simulat-ing human powers Homsimulat-ing rockets do not exhibit purposes as we do, pocket calculators do not show math-ematical intelligence, and so on Also, by comparing the performance of machines with human performance, we can sharpen our everyday acquaintance with what is involved in the latter Delineation of everyday mentality is both essential to and aided by the attempt to model how it works
It is tempting to help the mechanical models out with internal directors or subagents in order to get them to work as explanations of what people do This is harmless
as a linguistic place-holding device, indicating just where more work on the mechanism needs to be done But it is damaging if the internal operators are transformed into Cartesian *egos, the kind of invisible metaphysical con-troller which Ryle caricatured as the *ghost in the machine The trouble is that such things are inaccessible (at least in practice), their form or location being unspeci-fied, and there is a danger of endowing them with the kind
of powers the mechanism was introduced to explain, thereby duplicating the explanatory project
What locks the myth of Cartesian egos into place is that
we suppose that our knowledge of our own unscientific minds is yielded by a species of continuous inner percep-tion Our being conscious, it is easy to think, consists in introspecting what goes on in our thinking, feeling, and willing parts Then it looks as is if we all have a hot-line either to the Cartesian ego or to the machinery which the brain researchers posit in their latest models The every-day and the scientific concepts of mind seem to converge, though it will usually be said that we have access only to a small part of our minds, the bit of the electronic iceberg above the surface As if someone who tells you what is in her mind and the brain researcher who tells you how her mind works are reporting on the same subject-matter (observed, no doubt, from a different ‘aspect’)
In my view, this perceptual view of consciousness as
*introspection is a mistake When we give our motives, state our beliefs, express how we feel, announce the course of our deliberations, or reveal our imaginings, we are not at all describing our scientific minds ‘from a sub-jective point of view’, but providing more evidence about how our everyday minds work The sense in which every-day thoughts may be revealed or hidden is not the sense in which brain mechanisms may be revealed or hidden, and our interpretion of puzzling behaviour by our friends is not in competition with the explanations of brain researchers On any view, adjudicating skirmishes at the boundaries between the everyday and the scientific con-cepts of mentality remains important philosophical work
j.e.r.s
*mind, syntax, and semantics; mind–body problem; mind, problems of the philosophy of; mind, history of the philosophy of; inner sense
586 mental events
Trang 8D C Dennett, Brainstorms (Brighton, 1979).
R Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1642), in many edns.
and translations, e.g E Anscombe and P T Geach, Descartes:
Philosophical Writings (London, 1954).
G Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, 1949).
mental reductionism Reductionism about a given
sub-ject-matter X is the claim that facts about X can be
‘reduced’ to—that is, can be shown or construed to be—
facts about another subject-matter Y (‘the reduction
base’) Reductionism in philosophy of mind is the claim
that facts about mentality are reducible to physical facts,
i.e facts about matter and material processes
What is required to implement mind–body reduction?
According to the *dualism of Descartes, minds exist as
‘mental substances’, objects wholly outside the physical
domain On this view, facts about mentality would be
physically irreducible since they would be facts about
these immaterial entities The first requirement for
mind–body reduction, therefore, is the renouncement of
minds as non-physical objects This can be done either by
identifying minds with brains or other appropriate
phys-ical structures, or by refusing to countenance minds as
substantival entities and attributing mental properties to
organisms and other physical systems In either case, it is
physical systems that have psychological properties
The remaining step in mind–body reduction concerns
mental properties, e.g being in pain, sensing a green
patch, believing that snow is cold, and their analogues in
systematic psychology Let M be a mental property: the
physical reduction of M is usually thought to require a
‘physical correlate’ of M, i.e a physical property with
which M is necessarily coextensive When a pervasive
sys-tem of physical correlates is found for mental properties,
mental properties could, it is thought, be identified with
their physical correlates
*Logical behaviourism sought to reduce mental
prop-erties by defining them in terms of behaviours and
behav-ioural dispositions Although mentality seems intimately
tied to behaviour, it is now widely agreed that mental
terms resist behavioural definitions The demise of
behav-iouristic reductionism has led to the hope that the mental
might be physically reduced through empirical laws
con-necting mental and physical properties Nomological
reduction of mental properties would proceed by
provid-ing for each mental property M a nomologically
coexten-sive physical property P—that is, where ‘M occurs if and
only if P occurs’ holds as a matter of empirical law
Accord-ing to the *identity theory of mind, every mental property
has a neural correlate with which it is to be identified; if
pain is uniformly correlated as a matter of law with, say,
the activation of c-fibres, pain may be reductively
identi-fied with c-fibre activation, and similarly for other mental
properties and kinds
The significance of mind–body reduction is claimed
to be twofold: ontological economy and unity of theory
By dispensing with minds as substances of a special sort
and their irreducibly psychic features, we simplify our
ontology By construing mental properties as complex neural properties and taking physical organisms as their bearers, psychology can be integrated with the underlying biological and physical sciences
Two lines of consideration have been responsible for the decline of reductionism One is psychophysical anom-alism, the claim that there are no laws connecting mental and physical phenomena, and hence no laws of the sort required for the nomological reduction of the former to the latter The other is the *variable (or multiple) realiz-ability of mental properties If a mental property is multi-ply realized by a variety of physical properties in diverse species and structures, it could not, the argument goes, be identified with any single physical property These consid-erations have led many philosophers to favour non-reductive physicalism (*mind–body problem; *physicalism;
*functionalism), the doctrine that although all the individ-uals of this world are physical, certain properties of these individuals, in particular their psychological properties, are not reducible to physical properties j.k
D Davidson, ‘Mental Events’, in Essays on Actions and Events
(Oxford, 1980)
J Fodor, ‘Special Sciences, or the Disunity of Science as a
Work-ing Hypothesis’, Synthese (1974).
J Kim, ‘The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism’, in Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge, 1993).
T Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, Philosophical Review (1974).
mental states A disputed notion Many philosophers have held that beliefs, desires, intentions, etc are real states, but have disagreed profoundly on their nature, some maintaining that they are non-material states (Descartes) and others that they must be physical states if interactions with sense-organs and bodily movements are
to be possible Tough materialists (Churchland) hold that talk of such states will become dispensable in favour of neural descriptions, while others (Dennett) concede the non-reality of mental states but hold that use of psycho-logical terms is indispensable Ryle held that belief-claims are really claims about *dispositions to behaviour, but Arthur Collins has recently argued they are epistemic risk
claims—‘I believe that p’ means ‘p and I am right, or not-p
and I am wrong’—with no reference to a state involved For questions about criteria for mental states, see the entry on mental events The above disputes extend to the notion of mental events, since most mental events are reckoned to be the arrival or cessation of mental states
o.r.j
*dualism; functionalism; materialism; physicalism
Arthur Collins, The Nature of Mental Things (Notre Dame, Ind.,
1987)
Peter Smith and O R Jones, The Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge,
1986)
mereology. Mereology is the formal theory of part–whole relations, whose early developers included Les´niewski, Tarski, and Goodman The standard theory regards any whole as identical with the sum of its parts and
mereology 587
Trang 9consequently identifies any two objects containing all and
only the same parts This makes it difficult to
accommo-date the case of organic wholes, such as living organisms,
which can survive the replacement of some of their parts
and consequently cannot be identified at any one time
with the sum of their concurrently existing parts
How-ever, modal and temporal extensions of the standard
the-ory promise solutions to such difficulties
The relationship of a whole to its proper parts is
import-antly different from that of a set to its members, though
David Lewis has recently argued that a set may be
regarded as the mereological sum of its unit subsets
e.j.l
*thing
D K Lewis, Parts of Classes (Oxford, 1991).
P M Simons, Parts: A Study in Ontology (Oxford, 1987).
meritocracy.Any society that creates an élite by suitable
rewards based on accomplishments that distinguish some
from others is a meritocracy Thus it has been described as
a society characterized by ‘careers open to talents’ ( John
Rawls) The aristocracy of merit is thought to be natural,
since it is grounded on the exercise of esteem-worthy
per-sonal traits Merit is definable as the superior productivity
or performance that results when intelligence is joined
with effort, popularized in the formula I + E = M
(Michael Young) A meritocracy requires equality of
opportunity and some form of central planning; it must
prohibit egalitarian levelling as well as any form of
nepo-tism or hereditary aristocracy h.a.b
*aristocracy, natural; conservatism; élites; élitism
Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870–2033 (London,
1958)
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice(1907–61) French
phenomen-ologist and co-founder with Sartre of existential
philoso-phy Merleau-Ponty’s constant target was the subject–
object *dualism of *Cartesianism, which arguably still
continued to dominate Sartre’s existentialism Drawing
on Husserl’s notion of a pre-predicative *intentionality
and on Heidegger’s exposition of human existence as
being-in-the-world, Merleau-Ponty developed a
descrip-tion of the world as the field of experience in which I find
myself Descartes’s Cogito was transformed to read ‘I
belong to myself while belonging to the world’ Any
attempt to constitute the world as an object of knowledge
is always derivative in relation to that primary access to
the world that Merleau-Ponty located in the body
Phenomenology of Perception (1945) established
Merleau-Ponty as the pre-eminent philosopher of the body The
body is neither subject, nor object, but an ambiguous
mode of existence that infects all knowledge
Merleau-Ponty drew on the critical examination of contemporary
psychology and physiology presented in his first book, The
Structure of Behaviour (1942), to argue the primacy of
per-ception Merleau-Ponty questioned the attempt of
trad-itional philosophy to look to *perception to provide some
guarantees that mark its difference from hallucination What is given in perception is ambiguous However, this does not lead to scepticism, any more than does the experi-ence of disillusionment The discovery that one was the victim of an illusion does not challenge faith in perception altogether It is only in the name of a new perception that
a previous perception is doubted
Merleau-Ponty distinguished what reflection reveals from what is given in unreflective experience This led him to the idea of a radical reflection Radical reflection was Merleau-Ponty’s alternative to *analysis, which he consistently criticized Analytic thought on his view breaks up experience into constituents, for example sensa-tions and qualities, and is thus obliged to invent a power of synthesis in an attempt to rebuild the world of experience
In spite of this, his work has found a more receptive audi-ence among analytic philosophers than other phenomen-ologists have managed to receive
Throughout his writings Merleau-Ponty sought ways
to explore the body’s primordial contact with the world prior to the impact of analysis In doing so, he was resisting
a tendency of contemporary scientific and philosophic thought to valorize autonomous knowledge arrived at under experimental conditions In the late essay ‘Eye and Mind’ (1961) Merleau-Ponty turned to painting for evi-dence of the character of the body’s relation to the world, evidence that provides no consolation for those in search
of definitive conclusions A similar conclusion arose from his studies on language that introduced Saussurean lin-guistics into phenomenology In the abandoned manu-script ‘The Prose of the World’ and in the collection of
essays Signs (1960) Merleau-Ponty challenged the ideal of
an algorithmic language
In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty introduced
the notion of flesh in a new attempt to explore the sense in which the seer is caught up in what he or she sees Mer-leau-Ponty had come to recognize his earlier conception
of the body as still tied to the dualistic metaphysics he was committed to challenging For that reason flesh was not presented in opposition either to the mind or to the world, but as an element, much as air and water are elements Unfortunately, the book was still incomplete at the time of his death Scholars have had to rely heavily on his working notes in order to assess the extent to which the emphasis
on ontology in The Visible and the Invisible represents a
departure from his earlier phenomenological studies and
M Langer, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception
(Tallahas-see, Fla., 1989)
G B Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (Athens, Oh.,
1981)
E Matthews, The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (London, 2002).
M Merleau-Ponty, Basic Writings (London, 2003).
meta-ethicsis the philosophical study of the nature of moral judgement So, instead of being concerned with questions of what actually is right or wrong (or good or bad), it is concerned with the meaning or significance of
588 mereology
Trang 10calling something right or wrong (or good or bad) Since
both of these kinds of inquiry can properly be called ethics,
the term meta-ethics may be used more precisely to denote
the latter kind Meta-ethics includes both the meaning of
moral terms and also such questions as whether moral
judgements are objective or subjective It also includes
others of the *problems of moral philosophy r.h
*moral philosophy, history of; emotivism;
prescrip-tivism; moral realism
metalanguage.The one in which the properties of a
lan-guage under study, the object lanlan-guage, are stated The
metalanguage may be identical to the object language, as
when the grammatical properties of English are stated in
English, but it is often distinct from the object language
According to an influential view of Tarski, some semantic
properties of a language L can be expressed only in a
dis-tinct metalanguage, not in L itself. a.gup
A Tarski, ‘The Semantic Conception of Truth’, Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research (1944).
metalogic.The mathematical and philosophical study of
the components of systems of logic Examples include
rig-orous analyses of notions like logical consequence,
*deduction, *logical form, *satisfaction, and *denotation
A typical result of metalogic is a *completeness theorem
establishing that a model-theoretic notion of consequence
is captured by the arguments derivable in a given
*logical theory
Stephen Kleene, Introduction to Metamathematics (Amsterdam,
1952)
metaphilosophy.The philosophy of philosophy
Philoso-phy is the attempt to solve philosophical problems ‘What
is philosophy?’ is itself a philosophical problem, so
metaphilosophy is essentially the attempt to solve that
problem
On metaphysical conceptions of philosophy,
philoso-phy is the attempt to describe reality as opposed to
appear-ance For example, Plato draws a distinction between the
world of doxa (belief, opinion) and the world of episte¯me¯
(knowledge) The perfect, unchanging eidea (Forms,
essences) which exist independently of minds and
spatio-temporal objects are the true objects of philosophical
study By this picture, Plato reconciled the competing
views of his Pre-Socratic predecessors Parmenides,
according to whom there is only unchanging being, and
Heraclitus, according to whom there is only becoming, or
the transition between being and nothingness Arguably,
Augustine’s distinction between the city of God and the
earthly city, Descartes’s distinction between mental and
physical substances, Leibniz’s postulation of monads,
Spinoza’s one substance, Schopenhauer’s Wille and
(partly malgré eux) Hegel’s Geist (Spirit) and Heidegger’s
Sein (Being) are metaphysical doctrines in this broad
sense
On anti-metaphysical conceptions of philosophy, knowledge of reality is impossible, either because of the constraints of the senses or because it leads to contradic-tions or because it deploys terminology beyond the limits
of significance Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, in very different ways, regard knowledge as constrained by possible sense perception Kant thinks the attempt to do metaphysics generates seemingly valid pairs of arguments with mutually exclusive conclusions called ‘antinomies’ Since Kant, philosophy has operated within a Kantian anti-metaphysical paradigm Because metaphysical phil-osophy is allegedly impossible, attempts have been made
to replace it by something else: the overthrow of capitalist society (*Marxism), the description of appearances (*phe-nomenology), natural science (*Logical Positivism), the description of conceptual schemes (*structuralism), the analysis of the meanings of ordinary language (*linguistic philosophy), literary criticism (*post-structuralism)
In medieval Christian, Jewish, and Islamic philosophy the true object of study is *God However, faith and
*revelation are needed because the powers of the finite human intellect are inadequate tools of theological understanding
Non-Western philosophy exhibits the same tension between metaphysics and anti-metaphysics The inconsistencies between, say, Taoism and Confucianism,
or Tibetan Buddhism and Indian materialism, are at least
as difficult to reconcile as those between, say, Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Hume or Hegel and the Logical Positivists It is not true that all and only Western philoso-phy is naturalist and anti-metaphiloso-physical and all and only Eastern philosophy is spiritualist and metaphysical Whitehead famously said that Western philosophy could be understood as a series of *footnotes to Plato It is certainly not misconstrued as an oscillation between Pla-tonic metaphysics and Aristotelian naturalism In philoso-phy, the twentieth century was an Aristotelian age s.p
A J Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth,
1976)
Charles J Bontempo and S Jack Odell (eds.), The Owl of Minerva
(New York, 1975)
Martin Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, tr W Kluback and J T.
Wilde (New York, 1958)
John Hospers, An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (London,
1997)
Anthony Kenny, A Brief History of Western Philosophy (Oxford,
1998)
metaphor. The starting-point for philosophical discus-sion of metaphor is whether or not metaphors are para-phrasable in literal terms On what has been called the
‘substitution theory’ a metaphor is assumed to stand in for
a literal equivalent The metaphor ‘Achilles is a lion’ can
be teased out to give ‘Achilles is like a lion in respect of the following features ’ However, after Max Black’s influ-ential paper in which he proposed what he called an ‘inter-action’ theory, philosophers have become acutely aware
of the way in which different hearers or readers pick out
metaphor 589