Other philosophers have argued that the distinctiveness of moral properties is lost in such an analysis *naturalistic fallacy, and have claimed that moral terms refer to ‘non-natural’ pr
Trang 1well as the world of religion Central to Nishida’s thinking
are the ideas of the ‘topos of nothingness’ and of the world
as the ‘self-identity of absolute contradictories’ g.r.p
*nothingness, absolute
Nishitani Keiji, Nishida Kitaro¯, tr Yamamoto Seisaku and James
Heisig (Berkeley, Calif., 1991)
Nishitani Keiji (1900–90) Deeply influenced by such
Western figures as Meister Eckhart, Dostoevsky,
Niet-zsche, and Heidegger, and yet firmly rooted in the
Chinese and Japanese *Zen traditions, Nishitani was the
major figure of the ‘second generation’ Kyoto School and
a consummately existential religious philosopher More
prepared than his mentor Nishida to engage the Western
philosophical tradition on its own terms, Nishitani was a
pioneer in the field of East–West philosophical dialogue
Concerned throughout his career with the problem of
nihilism, he developed an existential philosophy in which,
if the self is plumbed to sufficient depth, the nihilum or
void at its base may be realized as the absolute
*nothing-ness (mu) or fertile empti*nothing-ness (ku¯) of Maha¯ya¯na Buddhist
philosophy The philosophical synthesis effected in his
masterwork, Religion and Nothingness (1962), matches the
achievements of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger
The Religious Philosophy of Nishitani Keiji ed Taitetsu Unno
(Berkeley, Calif., 1989)
Nkrumah, Kwame (1909–72) African statesman and
philosopher, who was educated in the United States and
Great Britain, Kwame Nkrumah spearheaded the
move-ment that led Ghana to independence from colonialism in
1957, and became Prime Minister and subsequently
Presi-dent of Ghana He expounded a comprehensive,
physical-ist theory of nature and society, which he applied to his
vision of a political economy for the whole of Africa in a
*philosopher-king
Basil Davidson, A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah
(London, 1973)
noble lie A myth proposed in Plato’s Republic according
to which when human beings were formed in the earth,
those who should rule had gold mixed with them, the
sol-diers silver, and farmers and craftsmen iron The aim of
the myth is to keep individuals happy with their
desig-nated roles, but would anyone believe it, even after
gener-ations of indoctrination? The speakers in the dialogue are
doubtful, while insisting firmly, scandalously, and
possi-bly defensipossi-bly that rulers may legitimately lie for reasons
*ideology; teaching and indoctrinating
Plato, The Republic, 414–15, 459–60.
nocturnal council: see Plato.
no false lemmas principle: see lemma.
nomic.A term meaning scientifically lawlike, thus
distin-guishing a claim both from the merely contingent (as
‘John is very happy’) and the moral or legal (as ‘You ought
to keep promises’) Nomic statements, like ‘All bodies attract each other with a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them’, are generally
thought both universal and necessary The analysis of the
exact nature of the latter, especially as it has been thought
to be causal, has provided a good living for a good many philosophers for a good many years m.r
*causation; necessity, nomic
E Nagel, The Structure of Science (New York, 1961).
nominalism.Nominalism, traditionally understood, is a doctrine which denies the real existence of *universals, conceived as the supposed referents of general terms like
‘red’ and ‘table’ In order to explain how and why we clas-sify different individual things alike as being red or as being tables, nominalists appeal to particular resem-blances between those things Realists object that such an account involves tacit reliance on universals because
resemblance is always similarity in some general respect,
pointing out that different things resemble each other in many different ways But nominalists reply that such objections are misconceived and question-begging
In more recent usage, ‘nominalism’ is often employed
as a label for any repudiation of *abstract entities, whether universals or particulars, and thus embraces the rejection
of such things as propositions, sets, and numbers e.j.l
*realism
D M Armstrong, Nominalism and Realism (Cambridge, 1978).
nomological:see nomic.
nomological danglers: see identity theory of mind non-being and nothing Negative events, which seem to
be needed as the worldly correspondents of true *negative propositions, are troublesome because we lack criteria of identity for them, there being no non-arbitrary answer to
‘How many forest fires did not occur yesterday?’ To avoid commitment to them attempts have been made to analyse negative into positive propositions That Theaete-tus does not fly is analysed either as that every property of Theaetetus is other than being in flight or that there is some positive property of Theaetetus that is incompatible with being in flight, such as being planted on the ground
It is objected that these analyses are viciously circular, since otherness and incompatibility are themselves nega-tive relations To settle this dispute an adequate criterion for distinguishing between negative and positive proper-ties must be formulated, the most promising of which is based on a difference in their degree of specificity or entail-ment relations Positive properties, unlike negative ones, entail properties of both the same and different qualities than themselves; for example, red entails only non-crimson and other properties of the same quality, while
660 Nishida Kitaro¯
Trang 2red entails both coloured and non-green, the former being
of the same and the latter of a different quality than itself
In contrast with absences within the world, Nothing is
the absence of the world itself—a total absence of every
positive contingent reality Bergson utilized the above
incompatibility analysis to show that the concept of
Nothing is contradictory, since every absence requires an
existent positive reality that logically excludes it The
application of this analysis to ‘No contingent beings exist’
results in ‘Every existent being has some positive property
that is incompatible with being existent’, but it is unclear
what this positive property of existent being could be
r.m.g
R M Gale, Negation and Non-Being (Oxford, 1976).
A N Prior, ‘Negation’, in P Edwards (ed.), Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (New York, 1967).
non-cognitivism.The name of a position in ethics Like
many such names it is used more by its opponents than by
its supporters This one is used to designate that family of
ethical positions in which it is supposed that moral
judge-ments do not possess truth-value and hence can not be
known An example of a non-cognitivist position is
*emo-tivism; that is, the claim that moral judgements are merely
*moral realism; quasi-realism; prescriptivism
non-contradiction, law of The conjunction of a
propos-ition and its negation is a *contradiction and is necessarily
false In *traditional logic the principle was sometimes
taken to be a law of thought, along with the principles of
*identity and *excluded middle In the *propositional
cal-culus the principle is reflected in the theorem ~ (P · ~P),
which is a *tautology
A theory in which this law fails, where a proposition P
and its contradictory not-P are deducible, is an
B Mates, Elementary Logic (Oxford, 1972).
W Kneale and M Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford,
1962)
G Priest et al (eds.), The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Essays
(Oxford, 2004)
non-Euclidean geometry Any geometry some of whose
axioms and theorems contradict Euclid’s Euclid’s
axiom-atization was often thought to provide the paradigm of
*knowledge, by making deductive steps from necessary
and self-evident truths But as the parallel axiom, in
particu-lar, seemed less obvious than the others, many attempts
were made to derive it from them If it were derivable,
then by adding its negation to the others a contradiction
would be deducible from the new axiom set
Over several centuries many propositions were deduced
from the new set which appeared self-contradictory, so
the work then petered out; but no plain contradiction of
the form ‘P and not-P’ was produced In the nineteenth
century Bolyai, Lobachevsky, and Riemann deduced
more theorems, and proposed these systems as independ-ent ‘non-Euclidean’ geometries It has since been shown that if Euclid’s geometry is consistent then so are the others, so presumably all are Most physicists now believe that *space is non-Euclidean At least it is not necessarily Euclidean, as many philosophers had argued or assumed
a.j.l
*space-time
Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture (London, 1954),
ch 26
non-natural properties To ethical naturalists, moral terms refer to ‘natural’ properties, properties most often confirmable by sensory experience Other philosophers have argued that the distinctiveness of moral properties is lost in such an analysis (*naturalistic fallacy), and have claimed that moral terms refer to ‘non-natural’ properties, detectable by ‘intuition’ alone This was how G E Moore understood *‘good’ Others again have challenged the credentials of intuition as a mode of knowledge and ques-tioned how appeal to such properties could, intelligibly, guide the action of moral agents r.w.h
*ethical naturalism
G E Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge, 1903).
nonsense.A favoured term of condemnation in philoso-phy, ‘nonsense’ tends to enjoy here a different range of application from that found in everyday usage In the lat-ter, statements are often pronounced nonsense on the grounds that they are outrageously improbable or patently false, whereas nonsense is commonly taken by philosophers to be such a fundamental defect as to exclude even falsity The everyday usage may be hard to avoid
Suppose that a proposition, P, is declared to be nonsense because unverifiable If, by reflecting on P, we come to see
that it must indeed elude all attempts at verification, this realization is one which would in all likelihood depend on
our grasp of the meaning of P, in which case falsity rather
than unintelligibility would appear the most that could
*verification principle
A J Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London, 1946).
nonsense upon stilts How Bentham described the claim
of the French Revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen that there were ‘natural and impre-scriptible’ rights The claim that there were *natural rights was, to him, ‘simple nonsense’; it was the claim that these rights were imprescriptible (that is, unrevisable) which made it into ‘nonsense upon stilts’ r.h
Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies (Edinburgh, 1843), article ii
no-ownership theory The theory that experiences do not require a real *subject to whom they must belong Mental occurrences are treated as independent events, and our normal language for describing them, with its
no-ownership theory 661
Trang 3apparent reference, using personal pronouns, to subjects
who have them, is viewed either as not designating
any-thing, as with the first person, or as designating the body
to which the experiences are causally linked, in the third
person The theory was attributed by P F Strawson to
middle-period Wittgenstein and to Schlick Its point is to
avoid non-physical selves, but independent, unowned,
experiences are counter-intuitive, and, although
Straw-son’s charge of incoherence may be unfounded, there are
less extreme alternatives to *cartesianism p.f.s
*mind–body problem; mind, problems of the
philoso-phy of; persons; other minds
P F Strawson, Individuals (London, 1959), ch 3.
normalization.Dag Prawitz proved (1965) an analogue for
*natural deduction systems of Gentzen’s cut-elimination
theorem: every derivation could be transformed into a
normalized one The concept of a normalized proof is
more complicated to explain than that of a cut-free proof
in the sequent calculus, but the essential idea is the same,
the basic step being that of removing any part of the
for-mal *proof in which a formula is first derived by means of
an introduction rule and thereupon eliminated as the
major premiss of an elimination rule: an unnecessary
detour Suppose, for instance, that A & B is inferred from
separate premisses A and B, and that A is then immediately
inferred from it Plainly, the detour through A & B was
redundant; the two lines on which stood, first, A & B and
then A can be excised, together with the entire part of the
derivation leading to the premiss B This is the basic step in
a normalization If the application of the elimination rule
was delayed, the derivation must first be rearranged to
make it follow immediately upon the application of the
introduction rule
Building on a remark of Gentzen’s that a logical
*con-stant is defined by the introduction rules, of which the
elim-ination rules are consequences, Prawitz has explored
means of justifying elimination rules by appeal to the
introduction rules The strategy is to show that canonical
proofs of the premisses of an elimination rule can be
trans-formed into a canonical proof of its conclusion, a
canon-ical proof being one whose last line is inferred by means of
an introduction rule: this is a justification only under the
assumption that, if a logically complex statement is
known to be true, its truth could be known by a canonical
proof of it The condition that an elimination rule can be
so justified is precisely that the basic step of normalization
D Prawitz, Natural Deduction (Stockholm, 1965).
—— ‘Towards a Foundation of a General Proof Theory’, in
P Suppes et al (eds.), Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of
Science, iv (Amsterdam, 1973).
—— ‘On the Idea of a General Proof Theory’, Synthese (1974).
normative.‘Normative’ is the adjective derived from the
noun ‘norm’, which signifies either the average or usual
level of attainment or performance for an individual or
group; or, and more usually in philosophical discussion, a
standard, rule, principle used to judge or direct human con-duct as something to be complied with The phrase ‘moral norm’ is used generically to mean anything which proffers moral guidance, instruction, or a basis for appraisive judge-ment It is a term of fairly recent coinage, but having the same root as the more familiar ‘normal’ in the Latin word
norma, a carpenter’s rule or square ‘Normal’ and
‘norma-tive’ are importantly distinct, however, since it is not plainly the case that what is normal represents a standard to
be complied with The same issues arise over what is *‘nat-ural’ or ‘unnat*‘nat-ural’ being used as a standard n.j.h.d
See G H von Wright, Norm and Action (London, 1963) for a
treat-ment of issues in this area
norms, epistemic.Epistemic norms are the rules or stand-ards by which we epistemically evaluate beliefs For example, we often criticize beliefs that are formed in ways that are not appropriately sensitive to the available evi-dence, and this has led some commentators to suggest
that the rule proportion one’s belief to the evidence that one has
in favour of that belief is an epistemic norm, although this is
controversial Epistemological theories which analyse the key epistemic concepts like *justification entirely in terms
of whether the agent in question adheres to (or at least does not flout) the epistemic norms are known as deonto-logical theories, though such accounts have fallen out of favour in contemporary epistemology Instead, the cur-rently dominant view of epistemic norms is that they should play only a peripheral role in one’s epistemological theory Indeed, the view that a deontological conception
of justification is not an essential component of *know-ledge is often thought to be a defining thesis of epistemo-logical externalism, a subspecies of which is *naturalised
R W Miller, ‘The Norms of Reason’, Philosophical Review, 104
(1995)
J Pollock, ‘Epistemic Norms’, in his Contemporary Theories of Knowledge (Lanham, Md., 1986), ch 5.
Norwegian philosophy.Norway enjoys a varied and vig-orous philosophical life Yet by European and even Scan-dinavian standards her academic institutions are of quite recent origin The 400-year Dano-Norwegian union meant that between the founding of the universities of Uppsala in Sweden and Copenhagen in the 1470s and that
in 1811 of Norway’s first, the King Frederick University in Christiania (now, as the University of Oslo, Scandinavia’s largest) Copenhagen was the centre of Norwegian aca-demic life In 1802 a Norwegian-born philosopher, scientist, and writer, Henrich (Henrik) Steffens (1773–1845), first set in motion the Romantic movement in Denmark, and when the new university opened in 1813 (a year before the dissolution) it was a Norwegian philosopher with ten years of tenure in Copenhagen who became Norway’s first Professor of Philosophy Niels Treschow (1751–1833) was a Spinozistically inclined critic of Kant and the first notable Scandinavian proponent of determinism He
pro-662 no-ownership theory
Trang 4pounded a dual-aspect theory of mind and body and
argued for the primacy of particulars over universals
Treschow’s thought is summed up in a late three-volume
work Om Gud, Idee- og Sandseverdenen (On God and the
Worlds of Idea and Sensation) (Christiania, 1831–3)
Anticipating later evolutionary theories, Treschow
sur-mised that the human ability to react inwardly to outward
stimuli has its origins in some animal species The ability
to react to a diverse environment interacts dynamically
with a formative impulse to unity and generates the idea
of the One, combining the idea of God’s immanence in all
things with that of God’s transcendence and bringing with
it a teleological notion of the unity of mankind
It was the Danish philosopher, aphorist, and novelist
Poul Martin Møller (1794–1838), later Kierkegaard’s
men-tor, who introduced Norway to Hegel, in 1827–31 The
Hegelian tradition was consolidated by Marcus Jacob
Monrad (1816–97), the first major thinker to succeed
Treschow (in 1851) An orthodox Hegelian, Monrad was
critical of most post-Hegelian thought including that of
Schelling, Feuerbach, and Kierkegaard His opposition to
these, as well as to Millian politics, Comptean positivism,
and Darwinism (‘purposefulness without purpose’), put
him at odds with the spirit of the age, but Monrad’s
objec-tions—these views and movements were one-sided and
therefore latently dualistic—were acute and even
pres-cient He saw a paradigmatic case in point in what he
called the Englishman’s predilection for ‘facts’ at the
expense of the ‘universal idea’
What followed may seem to confirm Monrad’s
diag-nosis The early twentieth century saw a turn towards
empirical psychology (facts) and psychoanalysis, the
uni-versal idea being entrusted to historians of ideas (among
them notably A H Winsnes (1889–1972) ) In 1928 one
of two philosophy chairs was converted during its
incumbency by Harald K Schjelderup (1895-1974) into a
chair in psychology Until after the Second World War
the remaining chair, to which Arne Naess (b 1912) was
appointed in 1939, was Norway’s single tenured position
in philosophy Philosophy’s present place in Norwegian
academic life, as in the society at large, is due in large
measure to Naess In the 1930s he had participated in
Moritz Schlick’s seminar and retained regular contact
with the *Vienna Circle despite disagreement with some
of its tenets Opposed to the views that traditional
philo-sophical puzzles are pseudo-problems and that empirical
investigation plays no part in philosophical discussion,
Naess claimed that empirical investigations can play an
evidential role in philosophical discussions In a seminal
work written in the 1930s (Erkenntnis und wissenschaftliches
Verhalten (Cognition and Scientific Behaviour (Oslo,
1936) ), Naess anticipated many themes familiar in
post-war *analytic philosophy His ideas had a marked
influ-ence on social research in Norway, the promise of
collaboration between philosophers and social scientists
giving rise to the journal Inquiry, which Naess founded in
1958 Philosophers themselves were divided Some
exploited the methodology of Naess’s ‘empirical semantics’
(e.g Harald Ofstad (1920–93) ) or reconstructed it (Ingemund Gullvåg (1925–98) ) Others, provoked by a residual *positivism and *behaviourism in Naess’s pro-gramme, followed a path marked out by Hans Skjervheim
(1926–99) in Objectivism and the Study of Man (1959), a work
which had an early influence on *Jürgen Habermas These philosophers—among them Audun Øfsti (b 1938) and Gunnar Skirbekk (b 1937)—pursued inquiries into what Karl Otto Apel has labelled ‘transcendental pragmatics’, stressing discontinuities between explanation in natural science and understanding in social science Meanwhile Naess himself, after a period of concern with systemic aspects of his combined empirical and philosophical enterprise, resigned his chair in 1970 to concentrate on ecological issues
In Norway mathematical logic is famously represented
by Thoralf Skolem (1887–1963), Professor of Math-ematics in Oslo from 1938 to 1957 A classical tradition is maintained by E A Wyller (b 1923) The Wittgenstein Archives are located in Bergen, where a Wittgensteinian tradition in aesthetics has also taken root From the late 1980s, several philosophers, notably Knut Erik Tranøy (b 1918), have co-operated in the work of new centres for research into ethical and normative aspects of science, medicine and politics Today’s Norwegian philosophy departments house many non-Norwegians and many Norwegians have pursued their graduate studies abroad This accounts for a degree of cross-fertilization between the ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ traditions ( Jon Elster (b 1940) (Marx), Dagfinn Føllesdal (b 1932) (Husserl), and Alastair Hannay (b 1932) (Kierkegaard) )
A long-established introductory course (examen philo-sophicum) required of all university students, together
with the founding of universities in Bergen, Trondheim, and Tromsø in the post-war years, has meant that a rapidly increasing university-trained population is conver-sant with philosophical traditions and thought, while the University of Oslo’s Institute of Philosophy has become
*Danish philosophy; Swedish philosophy
M J Monrad, Den menneskelige Viljefrihed og det Onde (Human
Freedom and Evil) (Christiania, 1897)
A Naess, Truth as Conceived by Those who are not Professional Philosophers (Oslo, 1939).
—— Interpretation and Preciseness: A Contribution to the Theory of Communication (Oslo, 1953).
H Ofstad, An Inquiry into the Freedom of Decision (Oslo, 1961).
N Treschow, Gives der noget Begreb eller nogen Idee om eenslige ting?
(Is there any Concept or Idea of Particular Things?) (Copenhagen, 1804)
notations, logical We still have not emerged from the symbolic turmoil of the early history of modern logic A wide variety of notations are currently employed even for the simplest of logical calculi, the variety stemming from a number of competing interests ranging from typograph-ical economy to the ease with which the logtypograph-ical structure
of formulae can be determined and proofs devised There
notations, logical 663
Trang 5are two dimensions of variation: the system of punctuation
and the symbols of the logical and non-logical vocabulary
There are three main systems of punctuation used to
pre-vent syntactic ambiguity: the use of brackets, the dot
nota-tion of Principia Mathematica, and the bracket-free Polish
notation ofŁukasiewicz Differences of non-logical
vocabu-lary are usually trivial differences in the choice of letters
and their case Below is a table, admittedly selective, of
variations in logical vocabulary, the more common
sym-bols beginning each row, Polish notation at the end
Negation –P, ~P, ¬P, P′, P¯, Np
Conjunction P & Q, P Q, P · Q, PQ, Kpq
Material conditional P→ Q, P ⊃ Q, Cpq
Material biconditional P↔ Q, P ≡ Q, P ~ Q, Epq
Universal quantifier (x)Fx, (∀x)Fx,∀xFx,ΠxFx
Existential quantifier (∃x)Fx, ∃xFx, (Ex)Fx, ExFx, ΣxFx
Necessity operator , L
*Appendix on Logical Symbols
R Feys and F B Fitch, Dictionary of Symbols of Mathematical Logic
(Amsterdam, 1969)
nothing:see non-being and nothing; nothingness;
noth-ingness, absolute
nothingness.Philosophers have often seen nothingness
as an ontological, not simply a logical, category Plato and
Plotinus regarded matter, in contrast to form, as
non-being Heidegger claimed in Being and Time and What is
Metaphysics? (1929; 5th edn 1949, tr in Basic Writings, ed.
D Krell (London, 1967)) that the nothing, which becomes
apparent in objectless Angst, is crucial to our experience; it
is prior to, and forms the basis of, logical negation Human
Existenz has no ground; it arises from the abyss of nothing.
It culminates in the nothingness of death, and its meaning
consists in the anticipation of death The natural
interpret-ation of this (though one rejected by Heidegger) is that
*Dasein confers meaning, i.e being, on non-human beings
and on itself, and thus draws them out of meaningless
chaos, i.e nothing To avoid saying that the nothing is, he
says ‘The nothing nihilates’ (Das Nichts selbst nichtet),
which Carnap regarded as a paradigm of metaphysical
*nonsense For Sartre, specifically human being consists
in nothing or self-negation; this is why we can discern
‘negative realities’, such as the absence of a guest For
both philosophers, man’s radical *freedom is rooted in
H Kühn, Encounter with Nothingness (Hinsdale, Ill., 1949).
M Murray (ed.), Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays
(New Haven, Conn., 1978)
nothingness, absolute In modern Japanese philosophy,
this idea is central for many of the Kyoto School
philoso-phers It stems from the Maha¯ya¯na Buddhist notion of
‘emptiness’, according to which nothing is what it is in
isol-ation, but arises and perishes only within a network of
relationships with everything else In Buddhist practice,
however, one must avoid cleaving to the experience of emptiness: the nothingness that, as non-being, is the nega-tion of beings, must itself be negated before one can arrive
at absolute nothingness For Nishida the ‘locus of
nothing-ness’ is the basis of all experience; for Tanabe absolute nothingness is mediation through absolute ‘Other-power’ (of Amida Buddha); in Watsuji’s ethics the individual self has to undergo absolute negation to be fully integrated into society; and for Nishitani nothingness is above all to
be experienced—since it loses its absolute character if it is
merely ‘thought’ There are thought-provoking parallels
with das Nichts in Heidegger’s philosophy. g.r.p
*non-being and nothing; nothingness
Robert E Carter, The Nothingness beyond God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitaro¯ (New York, 1989).
nothing so absurd
Pythagoras and Plato, who are most respectable author-ities, bid us, if we would have trustworthy dreams, to pre-pare for sleep by following a prescribed course in conduct and in eating The Pythagoreans make a point of prohibit-ing the use of beans, as if thereby the soul and not the belly was filled with wind! There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it
(Cicero, De divinationeii lxviii 120)
Cicero’s dialogue De divinatione attacks divination Its
apologist Quintus cites the important philosophers who have believed in it, but Marcus, his opponent, argues that
‘those superstitious and half-cracked philosophers of yours would rather appear absurd than anything else in the world’ The Stoics, for instance, regarded current dis-belief in the Delphic oracle not as a sign of superstition’s abatement but as abatement of the ‘virtue’ of local subter-ranean exhalations, which, if it had really ever existed, would obviously have been eternal Yet Cicero himself practised augury, and defended it on other occasions in the belief that it promoted law-abiding behaviour j.o’g
*Stoicism
nothing so extravagant and irrational
Those unhappy people were proposing schemes for per-suading monarchs to choose favourites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities and eminent services; of instructing princes to know their true interest by placing it on the same foundation with that
of their people; of choosing for employments persons qual-ified to exercise them; with many other wild and impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive, and confirmed in me the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth
( Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ch 6)
Like their scientific colleagues trying to cure flatulence by applying bellows to the rectum, philosophers at the imagined Academy of Lagado reach absurd conclusions, presuming that the world conforms to their principles
∨
664 notations, logical
Trang 6Swift was a Tory from the age of 43, and regarded the
human as not ‘animal rationale’, only ‘animal rationis
capax’, and wickedness as ‘all according to the due course
of things’ Yet the aim of his satires was in fact social
improvement, and, even if Tory pessimism pillories these
as chimeras, it is after all the unworkable utopian
meas-ures that are really *common-sense Swift’s reactionary
thrust is double-edged, for it ridicules the engrained
human folly that engenders and necessitates it j.o’g
noumena:see phenomena and noumena.
nous.In Greek philosophy, the highest form of rationality
which is capable of grasping the fundamental principles of
reality In contrast to perception, which delivers
aware-ness of the changing, accidental properties of things, nous
consists in understanding their essential, immutable
nature Moreover, it supersedes belief, which may attain
truth but falls short of explaining the why and wherefore
of things For Aristotle, the unmoved mover of the
*prime mover
F E Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms (New York, 1967).
novel, the philosophical The philosophical novel is
usu-ally understood as that subspecies of *fiction which
endeavours to present a specific philosophical viewpoint,
sometimes metaphysical, sometimes ethical, and
some-times aesthetic Thus it is perhaps closer to the allegory or
roman-à-clef than to fiction proper For whereas it is
usu-ally a defect in a work of fiction that it usu-ally itself closely
with a particular viewpoint, for a philosophical novel, a
grasp of the fact that a particular world-view is embodied
is a pre-condition of understanding the novel
Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, for example, embodies a
particular moral philosophy, one in which the virtues of an
unpremeditated warmth and responsiveness are valued
above an alternative morality which is essentially
con-ceived as rule-governed, though Fielding’s Bildungsroman
also charts the dangers and limitations of a morality which
is so reactive and spontaneous Other examples which leap
to mind are the novels of George Eliot or Proust’s analysis
of memory and identity in A la recherche du temps perdu.
Characteristically, such philosophical ideas are illustrated
rather than asserted, as in Middlemarch, where George
Eliot shows us various forms of egoism In the twentieth
century the novels of Sartre presented existential themes
more memorably and vividly than his philosophical
writ-ing, and Camus’s The Outsider is a paradigm of the
philo-sophical novel
The free exploration of literary space in interpretation is
thereby placed within bounds set by the philosophical
pre-suppositions of the novelist *Interpretation is not only
limited by the text but also by the recognition that a certain
philosophical standpoint is involved The decision to place
a novel within this genre is consequently as much a critical
act as a matter of pre-critical classification r.a.s
*literature and philosophy; poetry
Peter Jones, Philosophy and the Novel (Oxford, 1975).
Stephen D Ross, Literature and Philosophy (New York, 1969).
Nozick, Robert (1938–2002) A philosopher of remarkably varied interests, whose most influential work presented
an articulate defence of a bare-bones *libertarianism Nozick argued that the state cannot have a very large role
in the economy and society if the libertarian rights of indi-viduals are to prevail In general, he argued against end-state theories, such as *utilitarianism or John Rawls’s theory of *justice, and in favour of process theories that focus on the rightness of piecemeal actions independently
of their contribution to a final state of affairs Nozick had a gift for finding memorable cases to represent his problems and an energetic style that pulls readers into debate He also worked on decision theory, epistemology, theory of
*conservatism
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford, 1974).
—— Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).
—— The Nature of Rationality (Princeton, NJ, 1993).
n-tuple:see ordered set.
number.There are several kinds Ordinal numbers pro-vide the structure to order collections of distinct objects (first, second, third, etc.); cardinal numbers are used to indicate the sizes of collections of distinct objects (zero, one, two) Natural numbers are finite cardinal numbers Integers are whole numbers, including negative numbers Rational numbers are ratios of integers, sometimes called
‘fractions’ Real numbers are used to measure (poten-tially) continuous quantities in terms of a unit, such as length in meters and mass in grams Complex numbers include so-called ‘imaginary numbers’, which are square roots of negative real numbers Arithmetic, number the-ory, and real and complex analysis study the structures of the various number systems There are philosophical problems concerning the ontological status of the various numbers—do they exist, are they mental, etc.—and there are epistemological problems concerning how we know anything about numbers
There are theories of infinitely large numbers Con-temporary *set theory, derived from the work of Georg Cantor and Ernst Zermelo, studies both infinite cardinals and infinite ordinals It can be shown that there are just as many integers and rational numbers as there are natural numbers, in that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the sets Nevertheless, Cantor showed that there are distinct infinite cardinal numbers and, in particular,
that for any set S, the set of all subsets of S is larger than S.
A set is said to be ‘countable’ or ‘denumerable’ if it is the same size as or smaller than the natural numbers, the smallest infinite set (*Continuum problem.)
There are also theories of ‘infinitesimals’, which are like real numbers, but are infinitely small Infinitesimals came
up in the study of continuous change, such as motion,
number 665
Trang 7both in the medieval period and in the original
develop-ment of the calculus The theory of infinitesimals saw a
rebirth in the twentieth century, through certain results in
*infinity; magnitude; mathematics, problems of the
philosophy of; measurement
Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam (eds.), Philosophy of
Math-ematics, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1983).
numinous:see holy, numinous, and sacred.
Nussbaum, Martha C.(1947– ) Nussbaum first came to
prominence as a scholar of classical philosophy: her
sub-stantial book The Fragility of Goodness was the culmination
of her work on questions to do with the meaning of life
and sources of value as these are treated in Plato and
Aris-totle and also in Greek tragedy The scope of her work subsequently broadened greatly She has sought to illumin-ate issues of moral inquiry and insight by examining how philosophy and literature overlap and show cognate con-cerns; she has examined questions of social justice and the ethics of development with particular reference to women’s place in society; and she has presented an ambi-tious theory of the emotions She holds a joint chair in philosophy and law at the University of Chicago, with associate appointments in classics, political science, and
Martha C Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge, 1986).
—— The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics
(Princeton, 1994)
—— Sex and Social Justice (Oxford, 1998).
—— Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge,
2001)
666 number
Trang 8Oakeshott, Michael (1901–92) British philosopher, who
read history at Cambridge and taught it there for many
years before taking the chair of political science at the
Lon-don School of Economics in 1950 Oakeshott’s basic
philo-sophical orientation was idealist He believed that reality
is mediated to us only in a number of distinct human
prac-tices, such as history, morality, politics, science,
philoso-phy, and poetry Each practice is a specifically human
achievement, each reveals only part of the whole, and
none is superior to the rest In becoming apprised of a
practice, we enter something which must be lived and
which cannot be reduced to formulae or analysed in terms
of extrinsic goals The rationalist, Oakeshott’s great
bug-bear, thinks it can Particularly in politics, he attempts to
turn what should be a conversation between friends, a
mode of living together, into an enterprise or set of
enter-prises The enterprise state will be deformed by ideology,
by managerial techniques and abstractions, and by
cease-less legislation and litigation Oakeshott’s work has
obvi-ous affinities with Wittgenstein’s and some of the same
difficulties Oakeshott’s practices, like Wittgenstein’s
*language-games, are elusive, and while Oakeshott’s
tar-gets are clear enough, his alternative to the modern
man-agerial state is fastidiously underdefined None the less,
all politicians and most philosophers would benefit from a
closer acquaintance with Oakeshott than they generally
*conservatism; idealism, philosophical
Robert Grant, Oakeshott (London, 1990).
Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (London, 1962).
—— On Human Conduct (Oxford, 1975).
oar in water Favourite example of how circumstances
can affect the *perception of an object, and make it seem
other than it is ‘The same object seems to us bent or
straight, according to whether we see it in water or out of
water’ (Plato, Republic x 602c) Familiar in philosophy
after Aristotle, the example divided sceptics (like Sextus
Empiricus), who thought it showed that the senses give us
no knowledge of an objective world, from Epicureans,
who insisted that if there is mistake or ignorance in such
cases, it must be attributed to the judgement, and not the
senses (Lucretius, De rerum naturaiv 439ff) Employed
later by Descartes and Berkeley, the example was
hack-neyed enough by the time of Hume to count as one of the
‘trite topics, employed by sceptics in all ages, against the evidence of sense’ It continued to feature in twentieth-century discussion, used, for example, by Ayer in support
of a *sense-datum theory of perception
J L Austin’s dry comment was: ‘What is wrong, what
is even faintly surprising, in the idea of a stick’s being straight but looking bent sometimes? Does anyone suppose that if something is straight, then it jolly well has
to look straight at all times and in all circumstances?
Obviously no one [does] So what is the difficulty?’
j.bro
*representative theory of perception
J Annas and J Barnes, The Modes of Scepticism (Cambridge, 1985),
ch 8
J L Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford, 1962), iii.
objectivism and subjectivism Theories that various kinds of judgement are, respectively, objective, i.e pertain
to objects, or subjective, i.e pertain to subjects (people) (1)
‘Fish have fins’ is an objective claim: its truth or falsity is independent of what anyone thinks or feels about the mat-ter (2) ‘Raw fish is delicious’ is a subjective claim: its truth
or falsity is not thus independent, and indeed arguably it is neither true nor false, even though taste can be sophisti-cated, discriminating, insensitive, etc The statement (3)
‘Most Japanese find raw fish delicious (while most Britons
do not)’ is an objective truth or falsehood about subjects It is
therefore perhaps surprising that one theory labelled ‘sub-jectivism’ about morality, aesthetics, etc is the view that evaluative claims within these fields are of kind (3), while another theory asserts they are of kind (2)
It is counter-productive to use a different term, tivism’, to mean the same as ‘subjectivism’ If by ‘rela-tivism’ we mean the theory that what is valuable (or even true) depends on changing circumstances, then it does not
Richard Lindley, ‘The Nature of Moral Philosophy’, in G H R
Parkinson (ed.), An Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (London, 1988).
objectivism and subjectivism, ethical There is a range
of views about moral judgements At the subjectivist pole, they are taken to be discrete feeling-responses of
O
Trang 9individuals to situations actual or imagined To move
towards the objectivist pole is to argue that moral
judge-ments can be rationally defensible, true or false, that there
are rational procedural tests for identifying morally
impermissible actions, or that moral values exist
indepen-dently of the feeling-states of individuals at particular
times To dismiss ‘objective moral values’ as illusions or
fictions—claims the objectivist—violates our experience
of the pressure they put on our will and on our emotions
and interests Only if they are misconceived as mysterious
entities, lacking perceptual qualities, can they be deemed
too ‘queer’ or fanciful to be taken seriously
That there can be protracted disagreement over moral
issues does not rebut the objectivist: equally persistent
disagreement in other fields—e.g historical study—
hardly calls in question the objective occurrence of
histor-ical events
Subjectivism too has more and less plausible forms If it
sees moral judgements as simply individual avowals of
feeling, then certainly no adequate account, in these
terms, can be given of moral disagreement—or of
deliber-ation either To understand them as the expression and
evocation of emotions and attitudes still does no justice to
the logic of moral discourse A distinctively moral point of
view must be acknowledged, and the moral requirement
to ‘be objective’—in the minimal but crucial sense of
dis-counting selfish bias If such a view still rests upon
contin-gently common human ‘sentiments’, as for Hume it did,
we have a mid-position—intersubjectivism That has
obvious attractions, but it is no less open to the
object-ivists’ complaint, that this account still badly
underesti-mates the resources of practical reasoning r.w.h
J L Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth,
1977)
D M McNaughton, Moral Vision: An Introduction to Ethics
(Oxford, 1988)
T Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford, 1986).
objectivity, historical: see history, problems of the
philosophy of
object language When a second language is introduced
to talk about a given language it is called the
metalan-guage; the given language is the object language These
are relational terms: one language is an object language,
another a metalanguage only in relation to one another
Thus, the metalanguage can, in turn, be an object
lan-guage in relation to another lanlan-guage The necessity for
the object language–metalanguage distinction in
seman-tic theory is revealed by the semanseman-tic paradoxes h.w.n
John L Pollock, Technical Methods in Philosophy (Boulder, Colo.,
1990)
obligation.To be under an obligation signifies being tied,
required, or constrained to do (or from doing) something
by virtue of a moral rule, a duty, or some other binding
demand There are also familial or parental obligations
deriving from a role or relationship Obligations are
nor-mally understood to form a subset of the moral factors which impinge on a person; there are other moral con-cerns such as to be kindly or generous which are not usu-ally thought of as obligations Kant, however, called these latter ‘broad’ obligations, allowing some latitude in their execution, in contrast to, for example, the strict obligation (as he saw it) always to tell the truth Kant thought all moral requirements were ‘categorical’ obligations Obliga-tions oblige one to do something in a way analogous to the way, for example, a closed road obliges one to find another route: they force or demand a course of action Obligation is sometimes contrasted with *value, as being what is peremptory and demanding rather than enticing and attractive The topic of moral obligation is challen-gingly discussed by G E M Anscombe in her ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (1958), reprinted in her collected
philo-sophical papers, Ethics, Religion and Politics, iii (Oxford,
*categorical imperative; ought; ethics and aesthetics
obligationes.A late-medieval disputation-form involving two parties, the ‘opponent’ and the ‘respondent’ After laying down some proposition as the initial case, the oppon-ent proposes other propositions to the respondoppon-ent, who must reply to each in turn by either conceding, denying, or doubting it The respondent must do this according to rules describing the relation of the proposition at hand to the initial case and to what has gone before Medieval philosophers argued about the proper rules to adopt for
obligationes; one common set of rules has features of
con-structive *counterfactual reasoning The terminology and
methods of obligationes appear in theological,
metaphys-ical, and scientific investigations p.k
*logic, history of
Paul Vincent Spade, ‘Three Theories of Obligationes: Burley, Kilvington, and Swyneshed on Counterfactual Reasoning’,
History and Philosophy of Logic (1982).
observation and theory.Provide different points of access
to the world—observation from the bottom up, theory from the top down Empiricists favour observations as a secure and objective basis for knowledge; we and the Baby-lonians would have seen eye to eye Theory, in contrast, is prone to error and prejudice; too many theories have turned out to be false and require speculative conjectures Advocates of theory find observationally based epistemol-ogies too pinched in their scope; attempts by the logical empiricists and others to construct theory on the basis of observations failed dramatically Yet there is great danger in speculative theory, especially in the social sciences where data is scarce, and a judicious balance between theory and data is the hallmark of good practice What is observed is generally agreed to exist, but *realists, in contrast to
*empiricists, allow that some non-observational terms in well-confirmed theories genuinely refer p.h
Robert Klee, Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Oxford,
1997), ch 3
668 objectivism and subjectivism, ethical
Trang 10obversion.A proposition is obverted by negating its
sec-ond term and changing its *quality from affirmative to
negative or vice versa Thus ‘All rabbits are herbivores’
(All S are P) becomes ‘No rabbit is a non-herbivore’ (No S
are non-P) All the four forms of proposition considered by
traditional logic may be validly obverted c.w
*logic, traditional
J N Keynes, Formal Logic, 4th edn (London, 1906), ch 4.
occasionalism. A theory about the nature of much of
what we take to be causation It asserts that all relations
between physical things, or between human minds
and physical things, which we intuitively suppose to be
causal, are in fact not causal Instead, the relations are a
consequence of God’s will in the sense that particular
events, the ‘causes’, are constantly conjoined with other
events, their ‘effects’, because when a cause occurs God
wills the effect to occur One reason it was put forward
was as the only conceivable explanation of causal
*causality; parallelism, psychological; pre-established
harmony
N Malebranche, The Search after Truth (1674–5), tr T M Lennon
and Paul J Olscamp (Columbus, Oh., 1980), vi ii 3
Ockham, William (1285–1347) An English Franciscan
dubbed the ‘More than Subtle Doctor’, Ockham defended
*nominalism, condemning the doctrine that universals
are real things other than names or concepts as ‘the worst
error of philosophy’ Rejecting *atomism in favour of
*hylomorphism, he practised poverty in metaphysics by
refusing to posit distinct kinds of entities for each of
Aristotle’s ten categories and restricting his philosophical
diet to really distinct substances and qualities with
certain relations thrown in for good theological measure
Yet, he defended the Franciscan school’s recognition of a
plurality of substantial forms in living things (in humans,
really distinct forms of corporeity, of sensory and
intellec-tual soul)
By contrast with Hume and Malebranche, Ockham
maintains the Aristotelian distinction between efficient
*causality properly speaking and sine qua non causality,
based on whether the correlation between As and Bs is
produced by A’s power or by the will of another Against
Henry of Ghent, he denies that there is any sine qua non
causality in nature, and finds it metaphysically impossible
that regularities in nature be drastically rearranged,
although natural functioning can be obstructed by God
and creatures alike Like other Aristotelians, Ockham
deems physics and biology possible because the
uniform-ity of nature principle is true Even for a nominalist,
natures are powers; co-specific individuals, maximally
similar powers that operate in maximally similar ways
An Aristotelian reliabilist in epistemology, Ockham
takes for granted that human cognitive faculties work
‘always or for the most part’—indeed, that we have certain
knowledge of material things and of our own mental acts
Ockham draws no sceptical conclusions from the
logical, metaphysical, or natural possibility of their
obstruction, because he defines certainty in terms of
free-dom from actual error.
Notoriously enthusiastic about logic, Ockham’s dis-tinctive treatment of the logic of terms (‘supposition the-ory’) reflects his metaphysical disagreements with other notables (e.g William of Sherwood, Peter of Spain, and
Walter Burleigh) His Summa Logicae rearranges the
trad-itional syllabus somewhat by subsuming the ‘topics’ under the theory of inference; and contains his brilliant and extensive development of modal syllogistic
In action theory, Ockham defends the liberty of indif-ference or contingency for divine and created rational beings Not only is the will a self-determining power for opposites (as Scotus insisted), its options include willing evil under the aspect of evil and willing against good under the aspect of good! So far as non-positive morality or ethics is concerned, Ockham endorses a ‘modified right reason theory’, according to which virtuous action requires the agent’s free co-ordination of choice with right reason (the primary norm) Because suitably informed right reason dictates that God, the infinite good, should be loved above all and for his own sake and hence obeyed,
*divine commands become a secondary norm Priorities are reversed in the soteriological category of merit and demerit, where free and contingent divine statutes make following the dictates of right reason a necessary condi-tion of merit and eternal blessedness
Excommunicated for his defiant defence of Franciscan poverty against Pope John XXII, Ockham spent the rest of his career under the protection of Louis of Bavaria, ener-getically promoting a ‘separation of Church and State’
according to which the authority of neither is regulariter
subordinate to that of the other, although each might
inter-fere with the other casualiter in a grave crisis. m.m.a
*reliabilism
Marilyn McCord Adams, William Ockham, 2 vols (Notre Dame,
Ind., 1987)
Philotheus Boehner, Collected Articles on Ockham, ed Eligius M.
Buytaert, OFM (St Bonaventure, NY, 1958)
Guillelmi de Ockham: Opera Philosophica et Theologica (St
Bonaven-ture, NY, 1967), i–vi, i–x
Arthur Stephen McGrade, The Political Thought of William of Ock-ham: Personal and Institutional Principles (London, 1974).
P V Spade (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ockham
(Cam-bridge, 2000)
Ockham’s razor, or the principle of parsimony A methodological principle dictating a bias towards *sim-plicity in theory construction, where the parameters of simplicity vary from kinds of entity to the number of pre-supposed axioms to characteristics of curves drawn between data points Although found in Aristotle, it became associated with William Ockham because it cap-tures the spirit of his philosophical conclusions m.m.a
Marilyn McCord Adams, William Ockham (Notre Dame, Ind.,
1987), ch 5, pp 143–67
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