Personal identity is, on this view, a case of animal identity.. The difficulty of constructing a defensible theory has led to a reconsideration of the methods philosophers have employed,
Trang 1One important issue about the performing arts
con-cerns the matter of the authenticity of performances,
usu-ally construed as something more than mere correctness,
and covering matters such as conformity to the intentions
of artists, to antecedent performing traditions, or to the
historical contexts of creation of works A second
import-ant issue concerns the role of interpretation in
perform-ance, and what the relationship is between such
performative interpretation and the more straightforward
sort of interpretation—critical interpretation—involved
Stephen Davies, Musical Works and Performances (Oxford, 2001).
Peter Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical
Per-formance (Ithaca, NY, 1995).
Paul Thom, For an Audience: A Philosophy of the Performing Arts
(Philadelphia, 1993)
Peripatetics.This is the name given, first, to philosophers
who worked in the school founded by Aristotle (the
Lyceum or Peripatos), and, secondly, to later philosophers
who commented on and interpreted his writings Notable
members of the first group are Theophrastus (371–287)
and Strato (c.335–270), as well as Eudemus and Aristoxenus;
of the second, Aristocles of Messene, Aspasius (second
centuryad), and above all Alexander of Aphrodisias (early
third century ad) Peripatetics were characteristically
scientists or scholars, rather than philosophers That
stance reflects Aristotle’s division of inquiry into
autonomous specialisms for which he claims to have
com-pleted, in main outline, the philosophical foundations But
it ignores the tentative and dialectical character of the
philosophical originator of the Peripatos j.d.g.e
There is no satisfactory study of the Peripatetics in English; but
for Theophrastus, see W W Fortenbaugh et al., Theophrastus of
Eresus, 2 vols (Leiden, 1992).
perlocutions:see linguistic acts.
Perry, Ralph Barton (1876–1957), a leading figure in the
movement of American *New Realism and the editor of
its manifesto (1912) Perry occupied the most extreme
position among his fellow realists—he was purest of the
pure He agreed with James’s neutral monism and
nega-tive answer to the question ‘Does consciousness exist?’,
and tried to explain perception without duplicating
objects, some of whose configurations were ‘physical’ and
others were what we ordinarily take to be ‘psychical’ In
General Theory of Value (1926), written after the steam had
gone out of New Realism, he gave a naturalistic account of
values, defining value as ‘any object of any interest’ By
virtue of his long tenure at Harvard, along with his
col-league C I Lewis, he did much to professionalize
philo-sophical teaching and research His biography of William
James won the Pulitzer Prize in 1936 l.w.b
Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy (New Haven,
Conn., 1977), pts 3 and 4
R B Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies (New York, 1912).
persecution of philosophers Even the most unworldly
of intellectual disciplines has never been able to divorce itself entirely from the worldly conflict which determines the course of human history Philosophy was born into a society dominated by revolution and counter-revolution, and the earliest of its great exponents, Socrates, was exe-cuted because his teachings, it was said, corrupted the young Modern philosophy originated in an era no less revolutionary, and some of its leading exponents were exposed to similar dangers
Unused to having their own ideas taken seriously, philosophers today may be surprised to learn that the Par-liament of the time regarded the doctrines of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) as a probable cause of the Great Fire
of 1666 Safely dead, Hobbes is the greatest of British philosophers; alive and kicking, he was dangerous to know, and those in charge of the universities were not dis-tracted by the notion of academic freedom from persecut-ing anyone who sympathized with his ‘lewd, scandalous and immoral doctrine’ In 1668 Daniel Scargill was deprived of a fellowship at Corpus Christi College and expelled from Cambridge for being ‘an Hobbist and an Atheist’ Scargill was promised in 1669 that he could return if he delivered a public recantation: two drafts of this were rejected; in the third, the unfortunate Scargill confessed to having been an agent of the Devil, but he was never restored to his fellowship and was obliged to live in extreme poverty
The hostility of more orthodox thinkers was aroused above all by the intellectual ruthlessness with which Hobbes insisted that all divine authority must reflect earthly power Nothing is more binding than the word of God: this Hobbes would be the first to allow But, he argued, the word of God, like all words, may be inter-preted in rival ways What counts as an authoritative interpretation must therefore depend on the power of those capable of enforcing it
Benedict de Spinoza (1634–77) shared with Hobbes the honour of being regarded by all respectable persons with the horror of ‘atheism’ which is matched by the horror of
‘communism’ in the twentieth century Educated in the rabbinical tradition, Spinoza broke with Judaism: he was formally anathematized in 1656, and it is reliably reported that an attempt was made on his life Like Socrates, he took no payment from his pupils: ‘mischief ’, said one of his biographers, ‘could be had from him for nothing’ Like Hobbes, he repudiated the conventional conception of God and subjected the authority of Scripture to critical
scrutiny His Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) was
pro-hibited by the authorities and placed on the Index of the Catholic Church
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) challenged conventional wisdom throughout his long life His opposition to the First World War led to imprisonment and his being deprived of his lectureship at Trinity College, Cambridge
A decisive influence on the campaign against nuclear weapons in the 1960s, and an advocate of civil disobedi-ence, he was also—with Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80)—a
690 performing arts
Trang 2leading light in the International War Crimes Tribunal
investigating American atrocities in Vietnam His book
Marriage and Morals (1929) was cited as evidence of his
depravity when he was deprived of the professorship he
had been offered at the City College of New York in 1940
La Guardia, the Mayor of New York, described Russell as
‘an ape of genius, the devil’s minister of men’ An
applica-tion was made to the State Supreme Court to compel the
Board of Education to rescind the appointment Russell,
the Court was told, should be regarded ‘not a philosopher
in the accepted meaning of the word’ but as someone who
‘by cunning contrivances, tricks and devices and by mere
quibbling puts forth fallacious arguments and
argu-ments that are not supported by sound reasoning’, an
advocate of everything ‘lecherous, libidinous, lustful,
ven-erous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent,
narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fibre’ Russell, it
was added, also ‘winks at homosexuality’
It would honour the profession if it could be said only
that philosophers have been persecuted; but the truth is
that, if philosophers have been among the hunted, they
have also been among the hunters Hobbes’s
contempor-ary Ralph Cudworth was a philosopher too, but he was
also Master of Corpus Christi: when Scargill was expelled,
Cudworth’s name was on the expulsion order Spinoza’s
contemporary Leibniz, a great philosopher in his own
right, must surely have recognized Spinoza’s greatness;
but he pretended otherwise Russell’s contemporary
J M E McTaggart thought that ‘academic freedom is
very precious and fragile’, but he also argued for Russell’s
removal from Trinity: ‘it is quite different’, McTaggart
said, ‘when he had done something the law pronounced
c.w
R W Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell (London, 1975).
S I Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan (Cambridge, 1962).
persistence through time.That something continues to
exist from one moment to the next has been seen by some
philosophers as requiring explanation Each point in *time,
they say, is ‘logically independent’: from the fact that
any-thing exists at a particular time, it does not follow that it
must exist at some later time Hence, if an object persists
through time, this must have some cause Descartes and
Spinoza both hold, though in significantly different ways,
that God is the cause, the former presenting this as a proof
of God’s existence Leibniz relies on the same
consider-ations to argue that all true propositions are analytic: if you
are the same individual you used to be, he says, this can only
be because your existence then and now are both essential
to your nature Hume, by contrast, argues that the very
notion of an object persisting through time is a ‘fiction’
derived from our propensity to run into one a sequence of
experiences that are essentially distinct c.w
Descartes, Third Meditation.
Spinoza, Ethics, First Part, prop XXIV.
Leibniz, Philosophical Writings, ed Parkinson (London, 1973).
Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, book i, sect ii.
person-affecting principles Some moral principles evalu-ate choices in what Parfit calls ‘person-affecting terms’, which appeal to a choice’s effects upon the interests of particular individuals One choice is morally worse than
another in these terms only if it is worse for at least some
specific individual, who would have fared better given the other choice According to Parfit, person-affecting prin-ciples at best are only part of a plausible moral theory since they fail to explain why certain choices which affect the membership, as well as interests, of *future generations are wrong For example, if a choice between risky and safe energy policies determines both whether a catastrophe occurs and which distinct set of individuals (all with lives worth living) exists, in the distant future, then the former cannot be criticized in person-affecting terms, since there
is no affected individual who would have fared better had
*population
D Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), pt 4.
personal identity The way philosophers refer to facts about *persons which are expressed in identity judge-ments such as ‘The person over there now is identical to the person who was there yesterday’, the truth of which is
a consequence of the fact that persons remain in existence over time The problem is to say in an informative way what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for this kind of fact These conditions are called criteria of identity for persons A second related problem, raised by Parfit, is what importance facts about such identities should have
in our evaluative thought
No consensus on the first problem has emerged What has proved difficult is finding a balance between the intu-itions that are generated by imaginary cases, for example, brain transplants, which indicate that psychological conti-nuities are crucial, and, by contrast, our actual practices of tracing people plus a sense of our identity as concrete sub-stances, which seem to link us to something substantial Theories can be classified in various ways; one division
is between those which state the criteria in psychological terms and those which do not; another, regarded as important by Parfit, is between theories which view per-sonal identity as reducible to other continuities and those which do not; a third division is between theories which tie the person to a continuing substance, say the body, brain, or soul, and those which do not
Locke’s influential theory is of the latter sort He pro-posed that persons are essentially capable of self-consciousness Their identity should be analysed in terms
of *consciousness, which is standardly interpreted as the proposal that a person is identical with whoever’s exploits they remember as their own—the memory criterion His negative thesis is that this consciousness is not necessarily tied to a body or soul
The neo-Lockean research strategy defends a modified Lockean view To avoid possible circularities in the use
of the concept of memory they have constructed
personal identity 691
Trang 3psychological concepts, which are explicitly defined
with-out using the concept of personal identity The
psycho-logical continuities required are weakened The structure of
the theory is more complex to deal with problems of fission
The major alternative approach to this tradition
requires the persistence of some substantial item for the
person to survive A Cartesian view is that we have
non-material souls and survive so long as the particular soul
does More popular, though, are accounts according to
which the continuant required must be physical One
sug-gestion, defended by Williams, is that the person is tied to
the body This fits our treatment of actual cases, but
gen-erates a counter-intuitive verdict when we consider
imagin-ary ones A related theory, developed by Wiggins, is that it
is a mistake to allow, as Lockeans do, any distinction
between the person and the animal Personal identity is,
on this view, a case of animal identity
An alternative physicalist account claims that a person
is tied to that (physical) item which sustains the person’s
basic psychological capacities, supposedly the brain This
fits certain intuitions better than bodily theories, but has
difficulty explaining exactly why psychological
continu-ities grounded in more radically non-standard ways are
not also enough for the person to survive
The difficulty of constructing a defensible theory has
led to a reconsideration of the methods philosophers have
employed, which has been encouraged as well by Parfit’s
discussion of whether personal identity matters He
argues, in various ways, that it does not, one being
that brain-splitting plus transplants would give what
mat-ters to us but, because it generates two candidates, does
not preserve the original person So, he concludes,
identity does not matter Many are unhappy with Parfit’s
conclusion, and also wish to reconsider the method
employed to reach it
These methodological inquiries have led to no
agree-ment, and all of the described theories are under active
*animalism; reductionism, psychological, in personal
identity
R Martin and J Barresi (eds.), Personal Identity (Oxford, 2002).
H Noonan, Personal Identity (London, 1989).
D Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), esp pt 3.
J Perry, Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self (Indianapolis, 2002).
S Shoemaker and R Swinburne, Personal Identity (London, 1984).
P F Snowdon, ‘Persons, Animals, and Ourselves’, in C Gill (ed.),
The Person and the Human Mind (Oxford, 1990).
personalism.As a label applied primarily to the
philoso-phy of the French thinker Emmanuel Mounier (1905–50),
a Christian version of existentialism stressing communion
on the basis of shared values, with the person, as distinct
from the political individual, as the locus of a ‘unique
voca-tion’ directed towards fellowship Other philosophers
who have made personhood a fundamental concept
include the German philosopher Rudolf Hermann Lotze
(1817–81), the American idealists Josiah Royce
(1855–1916) and Edgar Sheffield Brightman (1884–1953),
and the Scottish humanist, John Macmurray (1891–1976) Common to these thinkers is the view that the finite indi-vidual is somehow grounded in and seeks its fulfilment in
an infinite spirit, or God, understood as personal, though Macmurray opposed idealism and considered ‘God’ mainly a negative concept given positive content only in actual relations among persons Personalism in these wider senses has affinities with the process theism of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) and Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) An early exponent was the Nor-wegian philosopher Niels Treschow (1751–1833) a.h
E S Brightman, Person and Reality (New York, 1958).
J Macmurray, Persons in Relation (London, 1961; repr Amherst,
NY, 1999)
E Mounier, Le Personnalisme (Paris, 1949).
persons. On a purely functional view, possession of a range of specific psychological capacities is both necessary and sufficient for being a person The characteristics in question are determinable *a priori by reference to our concept of a person Locke’s definition of a person as ‘a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places’ is an example of a functional definition Given this approach, there is no reason in prin-ciple why an artefact or immaterial soul should not count
as a person, as long as the functional conditions are met
On the other hand, a brain-damaged human being who lacks the relevant capacities will fail to count as a person Descartes claimed that a person is a compound of body and soul It has been objected that talk of immaterial souls
is illegitimate because of difficulties in specifying singular-ity and identsingular-ity conditions for them Instead, P F Straw-son proposes that the concept of a perStraw-son is ‘primitive’, that is to say, it is of a type of entity such that both predi-cates ascribing states of consciousness and those ascribing corporeal characteristics are equally applicable to a single individual of that single type
The most familiar examples of persons in the Strawson-ian sense are human beings Some have claimed that only human beings can be persons, or, more modestly, that persons must at least be animals of some sort According
to what David Wiggins calls the animal attribute view of persons, a person is any animal that is such by its kind as to have the biological capacity to enjoy fully an open-ended list of psychological attributes The list of attributes is to be filled in by reference to the class of actual persons The animal attribute theory is, in some respects, more restrictive than a purely functional approach It rules out non-animal persons, and does not even allow that posses-sion of the enumerated psychological attributes is suffi-cient for an individual animal to count as a person; the
animal must also be a typical member of its kind On the
other hand, the animal attribute theory is more permis-sive than the purely functional approach to the extent that
it does not exclude from the class of persons a brain-damaged human being who has lost the psychological capacities included in the functional definition
692 personal identity
Trang 4The most serious challenge facing the animal attribute
view results from reflection about what the identity of a
person consists in If, as Locke argued, the persistence of
the animal with which a person shares her matter is
nei-ther necessary nor sufficient for the persistence of the
per-son, the person and the animal cannot be identical For
writers influenced by Locke, *personal identity is to be
understood as consisting in the obtaining of various forms
of psychological continuity or connectedness This
approach may be motivated both by ethical
consider-ations and by reflection on puzzle cases From the fact that
the continuities in question are not all or nothing, some
have drawn the conclusion that persons have an
onto-logical status akin to that of clubs or nations Another view
would be that a person is what underlies her psychological
capacities, namely, her brain
In defence of his position, the ‘animalist’ may argue that
thought experiment and conceptual analysis are not the
best way of theorizing about persons and personal
iden-tity The most reliable point of reference for an
under-standing of the nature of persons is what is known about
the nature of *human beings, even if such an approach
lays itself open to accusations of parochialism If some of
our intuitions about puzzle cases conflict with our best
overall theory of persons then we may be entitled to reject
*animalism
J Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford,
1975),ii xxvii
E Olson, The Human Animal: Personal Identity without Psychology
(Oxford, 1997)
D Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), pt 3.
P F Snowdon, ‘Persons, Animals, and Ourselves’, in C Gill (ed.),
The Person and the Human Mind (Oxford, 1990).
P F Strawson, Individuals (London, 1959), ch 3.
D Wiggins, Sameness and Substance Renewed (Cambridge, 2001),
ch 7
perspectivism:see Nietzsche.
persuasive definition:see definition.
pessimism and optimism The metaphysical theories that
this world is, respectively, the worst and the best of all that
are possible Taken in this literal, cosmic
sense—worst-ism and best-sense—worst-ism—the theories are of relatively recent
date, at least in Western thought, optimism going back to
the eighteenth, pessimism to the nineteenth century The
history of the terms themselves reflect the recent growth
of the theories ‘Optimisme’ came into currency in France
towards the middle of the eighteenth century, with the
English word ‘optimism’ following somewhat later in the
century From the outset, the term was used to describe
Leibniz’s position, particularly as developed in his
Théodicée (1710) The first recorded use of the antithetical
term ‘pessimism’ is in a 1794 letter of Coleridge By the
1880s it had also generally established itself as the name of
a metaphysical system—that in Schopenhauer’s Die Welt
als Wille und Vorstellung (1819).
Hence there are good historical and etymological grounds for regarding—as I shall here—the metaphysical theories as embodying the primary meanings of the two terms, even though current usage is much vaguer, largely indicating a negative or positive attitude towards things The two terms are also used more precisely and narrowly
to refer to the value of human existence In this anthropo-logical sense, the Platonic and Artistotelian ideas of human perfectibility are taken to be optimistic; whereas statements of pessimism are to be found in the books of
Ecclesiastes and Job as well as in Oedipus at Colonus, where
Sophocles writes that ‘Not to be born is the most to be desired; but having seen the light, the next best is to die as soon as possible’
Leibniz’s metaphysical optimism is based on his ration-alistic theology From the ontological argument, he knows that God, the most perfect being, exists; and such a being must have created the best of all possible worlds; hence this must be that world Imperfections are explained as necessary for this richest compossible whole—just as shadows are required by a picture to give form to the light and colour
For Schopenhauer, on the other hand, this world is so bad that if it were to become even slightly worse it would collapse into chaos Any goods and pleasures are required for this compossibly worst whole Schopenhauer’s pos-ition is based on his metaphysics, although this is often overlooked by those more familiar with his popular essays than his main philosophical work Whereas Leibniz’s metaphysics is rationalistic, Schopenhauer’s is empirical, based on an inner, immediate experience of our living bodies as will or desire Hence the real, underlying nature
of the world is not a most perfect being; rather it is will, feeding and preying upon itself Desire is positive, satisfac-tion is the negasatisfac-tion or suspension of desire Hence the world is wrong, both morally and in the preponderance of pain over pleasure Nor is there any hope that it can be rec-tified, since the fault lies in the substance rather than any accident or form of the world Schopenhauer develops this thesis by drawing on Kant: the apparent orderliness, goodness, satisfaction in the world derive not from what the world is in itself, but from the structuring required to make it into a perceivable, livable world at all Schopen-hauer also draws inspiration from Buddhism and Hin-duism, which he regards as essentially pessimistic religions—as opposed to Judaism and Islam, which he takes to be optimistic Yet at times he seems to recognize that, like Christianity, most major religions contain both optimistic and pessimistic elements: they are more or less pessimistic about this world and more or less optimistic about the next or real world
While pessimism and optimism have never been cen-tral issues in philosophy, pessimism did have some vogue
in Germany towards the end of the nineteenth century,
chiefly from Eduard von Hartmann’s elaborate Philosophy
of the Unconscious (Eng tr 1884), which develops
Schopen-hauer’s pessimism, while trying to combine it with Hegelian elements Anglo-American philosophers have
pessimism and optimism 693
Trang 5shown little interest in the debate, apart from Sully’s work
(see below) and occasional witty criticism—as, for
example, in William James’s ‘German Pessimism’ (1875)
What is probably most memorable about Leibnizian
optimism is its satirical rebuttal in Voltaire’s Candide
(1759) While Schopenhauer’s pessimism has produced no
similar satire—which is itself, perhaps, notable—it has
inspired the influential reactions of Nietzsche, beginning
with his Birth of Tragedy (1872), which largely accepts
Schopenhauer’s pessimism, although sublimating it
through the ideal of tragic life Yet in his later writings,
Nietzsche is hostile; for while he agrees in general with
Schopenhauer’s description of the will, he forcefully
opposes his negative, ascetic attitude towards it with a
joyous affirmation
Nietzsche’s provocative views on truth can also be seen
as a reaction to Schopenhauer For while Schopenhauer
was a pessimist about the world, he was an optimist about
knowledge and truth; for it is through knowledge, he
holds, that any good is achieved—either in transitory,
will-less aesthetic contemplation, or in the insight leading
to ascetic renunciation and nirvana, the highest and
most lasting good Nietzsche, in short, reverses this: he
is a metaphysical optimist, but an epistemological
pessimist, warning of the dangers for life of knowledge or
*life, the meaning of
A O Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936).
P Siwek, ‘Pessimism in Philosophy’ and ‘Optimism in
Philoso-phy’, in The New Scholasticism (1948).
J Sully, Pessimism: A History and a Criticism (London, 1877).
Peter of Spain (c.1205–77) Born in Lisbon he studied at
Paris (c.1220–9), taught medicine for several years at
Siena, and was later Court physician of Gregory X at
Viterbo He was appointed Archbishop of Braga (1273),
Cardinal-Archbishop of Frascati (1273), and was elected
Pope John XXI in 1276 His writings cover a wide range of
subjects, but he is most famous for the treatise Summule
Logicales It covers practically all the topics then taught
under the heading of logic and became one of the great
logic textbooks of the Middle Ages During the two and a
half centuries after its publication it was the subject of
Peter of Spain: Tractatus called afterwards Summule Logicales, ed
L M de Rijk (Assen, 1972)
petitio principii: see begging the question.
Petrarch(Francesco Petrarca) (1304–74) Italian medieval
poet and moral philosopher who revived practical ethics
with its emphasis on introspection and experience for the
Renaissance, taking as his models the classical Latin
essay-ists and letter-writers Cicero and Seneca, as well as the
early Christian Augustine In On his Own Ignorance,
Petrarch elaborated a mature critique of contemporary
*scholasticism, such as was found especially at the
Univer-sity of Padua with its concentration on logical sophisms
and philosophy of nature, and its scorn for moral issues Petrarch preferred a rhetorical approach to ethics, realiz-ing the importance of appealrealiz-ing to the imagination and the emotions in discourse aimed at moving the will His
major moral philosopical work, On Remedies for Fortune, Fair and Foul, a manual of Stoic psychotherapy, aims at
tempering and healing disturbed passions Reason dia-logues with Elation and Hope in one book, and with Pain
and Dread (linked to melancholia) in another in order
that an inner equilibrium can be attained, the Stoic ‘peace
N Mann, Petrarch (Oxford, 1984).
L Panizza, ‘Petrarch’s De Remediis and Stoic Psychotherapy’, in
M Osler (ed.), Atoms, Pneuma and Tranquillity (Cambridge,
1991)
phenomena and noumena These terms mean literally
‘things that appear’ and ‘things that are thought’ Platonic Ideas and Forms are noumena, and phenomena are things displaying themselves to the senses In Plato’s metaphor
of the divided line (Republic, bk 6), whatever lies above the
dividing-line is noumenal, that which is below it is
phenomenal In Republic 517b the distinction is between
that which is revealed to sight and that which is intelligi-ble; at 524c the contrast is between terms cognate with noumena and phenomena This dichotomy is the most characteristic feature of Plato’s dualism; that noumena and the noumenal world are objects of the highest know-ledge, truths, and values is Plato’s principal legacy to philosophy
Kant deals with this duality in his Inaugural Dissertation
(1770), On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intel-ligible World The intelIntel-ligible world of noumena is known
by pure reason, which gives us knowledge of things as they are Things in the sensible world (phenomena) are known through our senses and known only as they appear To know noumena we must abstract from and exclude sensi-ble concepts such as space and time
Kant called the determination of noumena and phe-nomena the ‘noblest enterprise of antiquity’, but in the
Critique of Pure Reason he denied that noumena as objects
of pure reason are objects of knowledge, since reason gives knowledge only of objects of sensible intuition (phenomena) Noumena ‘in the negative sense’ are objects of which we have no sensible intuition and hence
no knowledge at all; these are things-in-themselves Noumena ‘in the positive sense’ (e.g the soul and God) are conceived of as objects of intellectual intuition, a mode of knowledge which man does not possess In neither sense, therefore, can noumena be known For both Plato and Kant, nevertheless, conceptions of noumena and the intelligible world are foundational for
I Kant, On the Forms and Principles of the Intelligible and Sensible World (1770), in Kant’s Latin Writings, ed L W Beck, 2nd edn.
(New York, 1992)
—— Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd edn (1787), A 236/B 295–A
260/B 315
694 pessimism and optimism
Trang 6phenomenalism.The doctrine that physical objects are
reducible to sensory experiences, or that physical object
statements can be analysed in terms of phenomenal
state-ments describing sensory experience The main
twenti-eth-century defenders of the view, A J Ayer and C I
Lewis, tried, each in his own way, to show how the
con-tent of a physical-object statement involves appeal to
nothing more than sense-*contents or *sense-data, or
any-how sensory *experience Consider: (1) This snowball is
white (2) There is a white sense-content Does 1 have an
analysis in terms of 2? If so, 1 must entail 2, but it does not
Nor does it help to assume that one is looking at the
snow-ball and only at the snowsnow-ball, or to ignore the experience
of everyone else, etc This last is especially problematic if
we wish to construct selves from sense-contents Let us
waive that, however, and consider further the following:
(3) The light shining on this is red The conjunction of 1
and 3 together with assumptions of the sort indicated will
actually entail not-2, and hence cannot entail 2 And it is
then hard to conceive of any sense-contents whose
exist-ence would be entailed by a particular physical fact, even
one as simple and observational as that reported by 1, even
when combined with assumptions like those above
(exclusive of 3) (See R M Chisholm, ‘The Problem of
Empiricism’.)
Moreover, phenomenalists must invoke not only
actual but also merely possible phenomena, possible
experiences For a particular grain of sand may never be
associated with any actual phenomena, since no one may
ever perceive it There is of course no hope of isolating the
single fact of there being a snowball before me by means of the
one *conditional that if I were to open my eyes I would
have a visual experience of whiteness and roundness
There are ever so many different conditions that in the
absence of snow still give rise to the truth of that
condi-tional But perhaps the idea is rather this: if we consider
the possible courses of action open to me at the moment
and the experiential outcomes conditional upon those
courses of action, some such infinite set of conditionals
would capture the single fact of there being a snowball
before me If so, we could perhaps say that there being a
snowball before me was necessarily equivalent to the joint
truth of that set of conditionals
However, the introduction of such possible
phenom-ena imports a complication, for the possibilities in
ques-tion must be in some sense ‘real’ and not just logical But
real possibility is grounded in actual conditions And what
could function as the ‘base’ or ‘ground’ for the
phenom-enalist’s actual conditions relative to which his possible
phenomena are to be defined? What can ground such
con-ditionals as: I would experience a sense-content of
some-thing white if I acted in a certain way? Presumably it
would be just me and my properties (whether or not I
myself am also to be reduced, as in *neutral monism, or to
be left standing as in Berkeley’s subjective *idealism) If so,
then the fact that there is a white piece of paper before me
has a status relative to me similar to the status of the
elas-ticity of a rubber band relative to the rubber band
A major problem for such phenomenalism stems from perceptual relativity: white paper looks white under white light, red under red, etc Any possible course of experience resulting from a possible course of action will apparently underdetermine our surroundings: it will determine,
for example, that there is either white paper under red light
or red paper under white light, or the like For this reason
among others, phenomenalism now has few defenders
e.s
*perception; representative theory of perception
A J Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York, 1952).
R M Chisholm, ‘The Problem of Empiricism’, Journal of Philoso-phy (1948).
R Firth, ‘Radical Empiricism and Perceptual Relativity’, Philo-sophical Review (1950).
R Fumerton, Metaphysical and Epistemological Problems of Percep-tion (Lincoln, Nebr., 1985).
C I Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (La Salle, Ill.,
1946)
phenomenology.One of the most important philosoph-ical movements of the twentieth century It was founded
by Edmund Husserl at the beginning of this century and has had many followers, for example, Moritz Geiger, Alexander Pfaender, Max Scheler, Oscar Becker, up to the present Quite naturally, it has undergone many changes, refinements, shifts of emphasis, etc Originally, it was pri-marily a theory of *knowledge Later on, in the years after
1913, phenomenology developed into a form of *idealism Phenomenology distinguishes sharply between per-ceptual properties on the one hand, and abstract proper-ties on the other Consider two white billiard balls, called
A and B The white colour of A, which one can see with one’s eyes, is said to be located in space where A is The white colour of B, similarly, is taken to be located where B
is Furthermore, it is maintained that the colour of A is not identical with the colour of B, since they are located at two
different places The same shade of colour, according to this analysis, divides into as many ‘colour instances’ of that shade as there are individual things with this colour shade However, all of these instances are instances of the same colour shade There exists, therefore, according to phenomenology, also the abstract colour shade of which the instances are instances Let us call this abstract colour the ‘universal whiteness’ Phenomenology asserts that there is not only a direct perception of instances of white-ness, but also a sort of direct perception of the universal whiteness This perception is called ‘eidetic intuition’ By means of eidetic intuition we have knowledge of the essential features of the world Phenomenologists call such universals *essences
An essence can be presented to the mind in its totality in one mental act of intuition Perceptual objects, however, can never be so presented According to phenomenolo-gists, we can only perceive aspects of them This is one of the fundamental differences between essences and certain individual things What does it mean to perceive merely aspects of, say, one of our billiard-balls? There seem to be
phenomenology 695
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distin-guish between the colour instance of billiard-ball A, which
is a part of A, and the differently coloured sensations
which we experience when we look at A Assume, for
example, that A is illuminated from one side, so that half of
it lies in the shadow Even though that billiard-ball is
formly coloured, our colour sensation of it is not
uni-formly white: one part of it is much darker than the other
And if we were to put on coloured glasses, our colour
sen-sation would not be white at all Now, what
phenomen-ologists sometimes seem to have in mind when they speak
of perception through aspects is that the property
instances of a perceptual object, its colour, its shape,
appear to us only through the perspective variations of
our colour sensation and the variations of our shape
sensations
Secondly, and much more obviously, spatial perceptual
objects can only be perceived from a point of view For
example, when we look at billiard-ball A, only one side is
turned towards us and we cannot see its back In this
sense, therefore, we can only perceive, from a given point
of view, a spatial ‘aspect’ of it It is clear that this notion of
an aspect is quite different from the one mentioned in the
last paragraph
According to phenomenology, therefore, our
know-ledge of things divides into direct and indirect knowknow-ledge,
that is, into direct knowledge and knowledge through
aspects Essences (universal properties) are known
directly, but perceptual objects are only known through
their aspects However, in addition to perceptual things,
there are also mental things and selves How are they
known? *Consciousness, according to phenomenology, is
known, like essences, directly The mental act of seeing a
billiard-ball, a desire to be once again in Venice, a
remem-brance of strolling down the beach in Manly, all of these
so-called mental acts are presented to us without aspects
There is thus a fundamental difference between the
objects of the outside perceptual world and the objects of
the world of consciousness: the former are never given to
us wholly and completely in single mental acts of
percep-tion, the latter are fully given to us when we attend to
them But the self, the mental individual from which all
mental acts issue, is only presented to us indirectly, like a
perceptual object The realm of individual things thus
divides into an ‘immanent’ part, consciousness, and two
‘transcendent’ parts, perceptual objects and the self This
makes consciousness special, because what we truly and
directly know is only consciousness But some
phenom-enologists go even further and claim that consciousness
has a kind of being quite different from all other things
This claim plays an essential role in *existentialism
So far we have appraised phenomenology as a theory of
knowledge But it is often viewed not as a new
philosoph-ical view about old epistemologphilosoph-ical problems, but as a
new method of doing philosophy, and one speaks then of
the phenomenological method Sometimes, one even
talks of the science of phenomenology, which is claimed
to have its own method and subject-matter
So-called eidetic reflection, reflection on essences and their connections, is of course the heart of phenomen-ology This reflection requires eidetic reduction By means of eidetic reduction, we shift our attention from a particular instance of a property to the abstract property (essence) itself After the shift has taken place, one will
‘see’ the essence directly and in its totality Furthermore, after eidetic reduction, one also intuits connections among essences One may intuit, for example, that the essences of ego and of spatial being reveal that the former can perceive the latter only in spatial perspective Phe-nomenology, from this point of view, inquires into the structures formed by essences
The knowledge gained by a study of the relationships among essences, according to most phenomenologists, is non-empirical For example, the insight just mentioned that an ego can perceive a spatial being only in perspective
is gleaned from a connection between the essence of an ego and the essence of something spatial; it is not inferred
by induction from individual cases Such an inference, for example, would be involved if one concluded from repeated observations of particular whales that all whales are mammals But phenomenological truths are thought
to be not only non-empirical in this sense, but also neces-sary The inductive law about whales may be proven false, for example, by the discovery of a whale that is not a mam-mal but a fish No such possibility exists, however, for the phenomenological truth about the connection between the essence of being an ego and the essence of observing spatial things Since phenomenological truths are thought
to be both non-empirical and necessary, they are said to be true a priori
But this is not all there is to the phenomenological method There is also phenomenological reduction It seems that there are two sides to phenomenological reduc-tion Firstly, there is a general prescription to look at things without prejudice, to go to the things themselves, to leave theoretical speculation behind, etc Secondly, however, there is also a more specific side to phenomenological reduction It consists, as a first step, in the *‘bracketing of the objective world’ Phenomenologists rely at this point
on a thesis which was defended by the Polish philosopher Twardowski, who, like Husserl, was a student of Brentano’s Twardowski distinguished between an indi-vidual act of presentation, the content of this act, and the object of the act Assume that one is presented with the
bil-liard-ball A Then there occurs a particular mental act of
presentation This act has a unique content which is a prop-erty of the mental act, and it has, as its object, the
billiard-ball A Twardowski’s thesis is that every act has an object,
even those acts which intend things which do not exist If one hallucinates a big polka-dotted bat, one’s act of seeing has an object, even though this object does not exist In gen-eral, Twardowski insisted (for example, against Bolzano) that we must distinguish between the question whether a mental act has an object and the question whether its object exists Some mental acts have objects which do not exist Phenomenological reduction is then a method of revealing
696 phenomenology
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of whether these objects exist in reality, even irrespective of
whether there really is a non-mental reality
Phenomenological reduction enjoins us to study the
objects of our mental acts precisely as they are, and
irre-spective of their existence But for some
phenomenolo-gists this is only the first step They adhere to the much
more radical prescription that we must eventually turn
away from the ‘outside world’ and concentrate
exclu-sively on consciousness In one of Husserl’s later versions
of the nature of phenomenology, this exclusive
concen-tration on consciousness sets phenomenology apart from
the natural sciences Phenomenology thus has its own
method, reflection on the essences of mental acts, and it
has its own subject-matter, consciousness
Phenomen-ology, according to this conception, is the study of the
essence of consciousness The idealistic tenor of this
For Husserl’s development of phenomenology see his Ideas:
Gen-eral Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, tr W R Boyce Gibson
(London, 1931); also his ‘Phenomenology’, tr C V Solomon, in
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th edn (Chicago, 1927), and Cartesian
Meditations, tr Dorian Cairns (The Hague, 1960) For a
descrip-tion of the phenomenological movement see Herbert
Spiegel-berg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction,
2 vols (The Hague, 1960) For a general introduction, see
D Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London, 2000), and
accompanying anthology: D Moran and T Mooney (eds.), The
Phenomenology Reader (London, 2002).
Philo(c.20 bc–c.ad 50) Called Philo Judaeus or Philo of
Alexandria Foremost Jewish philosopher of the
Hellenis-tic age, a leader of Alexandrian Jewry, who defended his
co-religionists in an embassy to Caligula and in
sophisti-cated apologetics Philo’s thoughtful, cosmopolitan, often
allegorical Greek commentaries on the Septuagint Bible
synthesize Platonic, Stoic, and Jewish values and ideas,
laying a foundation for Christian, and later Muslim and
Jewish, rational theologians—although the impact on
Jews and Muslims was largely indirect Philo’s idea that
the Logos, the word or wisdom of God, mediates God’s
absoluteness to creation by articulating divine wisdom in
nature and in human intelligence, and his conception of
philosophy as the handmaid (ancilla) of theology, were
vital to the medieval synthesis Cast, seemingly, in a
sub-ordinate role, philosophy would shape all three
Philo, Works, ed and tr F H Colson, 10 vols., Loeb Classical
Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1929–53), with 2 suppl vols of
Ralph Marcus’s Eng renderings of works preserved in
Armon-ian translation
H A Wolfson, Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in
Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Cambridge, Mass., 1962).
Philo (the Dialectician) (Greek, 4th–3rd century bc) By
contrast to the *Master Argument, Philo maintained that
a predicate’s ‘bare suitability to a subject’ was enough to
make something capable of happening This, he pointed
out, would mean that things were capable of happening,
even though they were ‘necessarily prevented by external circumstances’; thus a log, he held, would still be capable
of burning, even though it was in mid-Atlantic Philo also invented *material implication: one proposition implies another, he held, when and only when either the first proposition is false or the second proposition is true; in particular, he held that the *conditional ‘If it is day, it is night’ is true, and that the argument ‘It is day; so it is night’
is valid, throughout the night but never in daytime
n.c.d
Gabriele Giannantoni (ed.), Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae (Naples, 1990), i 414–37 (= Elenchos, vol xviii*)
Philoponus, John (c.490–570s) From Alexandria,
Philo-ponus opposed Aristotle’s science, defending the Christ-ian doctrine that the universe had a beginning He argued thus: without a beginning, the universe must already have endured an infinite number of years; but then how could
it be true that, by the end of next year, the universe would have endured a greater number of years? For how could infinity be added to? Philoponus also attacked Aristotle’s dynamics, denying (as later did Galileo) that velocity in a vacuum need be infinite He also denied that a thrown javelin continued to move because propelled onwards by the air behind it—if so why not propel javelins by bel-lows?—suggesting instead that a force or impetus was imparted to the javelin by its thrower t.p
R Sorabji (ed.), Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science
(London, 1987)
philosophe.A French word now domesticated into Eng-lish, denoting any member of a very diverse though loosely associated group of scientists, writers, statesmen, and prac-tical ‘men of affairs’ whose works and activities constituted the eighteenth-century *Enlightenment movement in Europe and America (e.g Voltaire, Hume, Franklin, Buf-fon, and Diderot) The philosophes were bound together as
a group by their vigorous support of the developing natural sciences, by their insistent (and frequently courageous) challenges to the pervasive influence of outdated trad-itions, superstition, and prejudice, and by their common desire to facilitate the growth and spread of more liberal and humane political institutions All of these concerns, in the philosophes’ view, were only different sides of a single intellectual mission: to advance the cause of human reason,
to perfect its methods, and extend their application across
an ever widening range of pursuits p.f.j
Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, i: The Rise of Mod-ern Paganism (New York, 1977).
philosopher-king.One of the rulers of the ideal state in
Plato’s Republic (Plato himself does not use the term, referring to the rulers as ‘Guards’ (phulakes).) The basic
principle of the organization of the ideal state is that gov-ernment should be in the hands of those who, in virtue of their knowledge of the Good, are uniquely able to order the state for the good of its citizens The central books of
the Republic are devoted to an account of the educational
philosopher-king 697
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meta-physics) which is to lead to knowledge of the Good
c.c.w.t
C D C Reeve, Philosopher-Kings (Princeton, NJ, 1988).
philosopher may preach
The satirist may laugh, the philosopher may preach, but
Reason herself will respect the prejudices and habits which
have been consecrated by the experience of mankind
(Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ch.1)
The historian Gibbon was perhaps influenced by Hume,
who professed himself unable, despite his scepticism, to
avoid the ‘current of nature’ ineluctably sweeping him
into belief in the very things he professed to doubt, such as
the *external world But Hume gave this thought an
add-itional twist It is not just that habit and experience
‘con-spire’ to make us see everything in certain ways, but that
reason itself is ‘nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible
philosophers, persecution of: see persecution of
philoso-phers
philosophers and God: see God and the philosophers.
philosopher’s stone A conjectural and, in fact, imaginary
substance capable of transmuting base metals into gold
Its discovery and preparation was the fruitless task of
alchemists from early China and India, by way of medieval
Arabs, down to various Faust-like figures of the
Renais-sance such as Paracelsus It was a solid variant of the liquid
elixir of life The alchemists’ pursuit of it led to the
acquisi-tion of much genuine chemical knowledge and, indeed, to
the foundation of chemistry as a science a.q
philosophical anthropology: see anthropology,
philo-sophical
philosophical dictionaries and encyclopaedias: see
dic-tionaries and encyclopaedias of philosophy
philosophical inquiry: premisses and first principles.
There is an aspect of philosophy that is pervasive enough
to be sometimes used to define it: the criticism of
assump-tions Considering various ways of arriving at or
approxi-mating to knowledge, Plato places at the top ‘dialectic’ It
seems to be what *philosophy essentially consists of, and
its nature is explained by contrasting it with mathematics,
in which unargued and unexamined assumptions are
taken for granted Rational thinking without assumptions
is, however, an inconsistent notion *Reasoning is
move-ment from an accepted or assumed belief to some other
belief Even if the premiss is merely assumed and not
accepted, supposed, as the saying is, for the sake of
argu-ment, some rules of inference (and very often some
sup-pressed premisses as well) are required to provide the
conclusion drawn
A certain amount of philosophy has been presented in
an explicitly deductive form, with axiomatic premisses set out at the start as in the fascinating model of Euclid’s
geometry Spinoza gave his great work Ethics the subtitle Demonstrated in a Geometrical Manner His axioms turn out
to be quite numerous; there are seven for the first book, five for the second, and comparable handfuls for the other three, supported in each case by definitions Spinoza did not think that any philosophy set out in this way, even if all the inferences in it were valid, was on that account cor-rect He produced a version of Descartes’s system in this rigorous form but thought it in many respects mistaken The axioms had to be true, and that meant, since they could not be inferred, that they had to be self-evident
It is a general characteristic of rationalist philosophers to argue in this way, for example of Descartes and Leibniz and, in our century, of McTaggart Descartes presents ‘I think, therefore I exist’ as a kind of ultimate premiss, but does argue for it, assuming that ‘I think’ entails ‘I exist’ and asserting that the denial of ‘I think’ is self-refuting He then goes on to conclude that, since his premiss has the self-certifying property of being ‘clear and distinct’, any other belief with that certifying property is also known for cer-tain to be true, a principle used to authorize a number of substantial propositions McTaggart claims to deduce his entire philosophy from the axioms that something exists and an obscure ‘principle of determining correspondence’ Rationalist philosophers commonly proceed, at least in the first stages of their work, by way of indirect proof or
reductio ad absurdum, in which a proposition is established
by inferring a contradiction from its negation If that is to work it must be assumed that the inference involved is val-idated by a true logical law and that a contradiction is neces-sarily false The thesis about contradictions is not and the relevant logical laws need not be things anyone would be likely to question
But full-blooded deductive metaphysicians of this kind are rare; a rationalist need not be a rationalist through and through On the other hand, the minimization of assump-tions is also to be found among empiricists, particularly if they are mathematically trained and inspired Russell pro-posed, and sketched, the achievement of a ‘minimum vocabulary’ for the description of the world by definitional
reduction, and that project was realized in Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World, in which the main elements of the
whole apparatus of description are defined in terms of items
of sense-experience and the relation of recollected similar-ity But most empiricists follow a less arduous path The absolute first principle of *rationalism would seem
to be: whatever it would be a contradiction to deny is neces-sarily true Empiricists would not deny that, but would maintain that while it determines the form of our repre-sentation of the world, it implies nothing about what the world is in fact like Yet they too have, and give prom-inence to, large basic principles
Locke, Hume, and Mill hold that all, or most, substantial items of knowledge (or justified belief ) derive their title to acceptance from sense-experience (or introspection) That
698 philosopher-king
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claims of alleged moral, aesthetic, and religious experience
have to be dealt with as do those of such substantial, but
apparently unempirical, generalities as that every quality
inheres in a substance, every event is part of the history of
an object, and every event has a cause
The classical Empiricists were, in fact, committed by
their conception of the nature of philosophy as an
empir-ical study of the cognitive aspects of human nature to the
view that the empiricist principle was itself empirical The
problem came to the surface in connection with the
prin-ciple of verifiability, the twentieth-century version of the
empiricist principle Critics asked what sort of truth it itself
was: empirical or, the only alternative its proponents
acknowledged, analytic, true in virtue of the meaning of
the words expressing it? Neither option was very
attrac-tive To admit it was empirical left it weak and refutable
To claim it was analytic seemed to conflict with the facts
of our use of the word ‘meaning’ Popper frankly admitted
that his roughly similar criterion of falsifiablity, as a means
of demarcating not sense from nonsense, but science from
metaphysics, was a proposal or convention,
recom-mended on the grounds of its intellectual advantages
That undogmatic, persuasive conclusion is supported
by the widespread recognition that the theory of
know-ledge is a normative discipline, an ‘ethics of belief ’, setting
out rules for the right acceptance of beliefs That would
make it nonsense on the strict letter of the verifiability
principle, but, one might say, so much the worse for the
verifiability principle Many present-day philosophers,
however, following Quine, have gone back to the position
of the classical empiricists by taking the theory of
know-ledge to be the cognitive part of empirical psychology
Many unexamined assumptions are more embedded in
philosophical writing than those mentioned so far One,
which had a long and significant career, is that the greater
cannot emerge from or be produced by the less It is
stated, as something too obvious to require discussion, by
Descartes, and drawn on by Locke to prove the existence
of God It was mobilized again in the nineteenth century
to dismiss Darwin’s doctrine of evolution, but Darwin’s
view emerged victorious from the collision Another is
that sturdy support of mind–body dualism which denies
the identity of a mental event with any corresponding
brain event on the ground that it is conceivable or logically
possible for either to occur without the other occurring
J J C Smart pointed out that there is such a thing as
con-tingent identity as of a lightning-flash and an electrical
dis-charge, or, one might add, of a billiard-ball that is seen and
one that is touched
A philosophical treatise may be presented in a
system-atic order which does not correspond at all to the way in
which the ideas it contains were arrived at Premisses and
first principles are, therefore, more part of the expository
rhetoric of philosophy than of its real substance But
orderly exposition nevertheless contributes valuably to
making philosophy accessible to the kind of rational
*empiricism; verification principle
W W Bartley, Retreat to Commitment (London, 1964).
E J Craig, The Mind of God and the Works of Man (Oxford, 1987).
J A Passmore, Philosophical Reasoning (London, 1961).
K R Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (London, 1945),
ch 24
philosophical journals: see journals of philosophy philosophical logic Despite its name, philosophical logic
is neither a kind of logic nor simply to be identified with the philosophy of logic(s)—the latter being the philosoph-ical examination of systems of logic and their applications Though the subject of philosophical logic is hard to define precisely, it may loosely be described as the philosophical elucidation of those notions that are indispensable for the proper characterization of rational thought and its con-tents—notions like those of reference, predication, truth, negation, necessity, definition, and entailment These and related notions are needed in order to give adequate accounts of the structure of thoughts—particularly as expressed in language—and of the relationships in which thoughts stand both to one another and to objects and states of affairs in the world But it must be emphasized that philosophical logic is not concerned with thought inasmuch as the latter is a psychological process, but only
in so far as thoughts have contents which are assessable as true or false To conflate these concerns is to fall into the error of *psychologism, much decried by Frege
No single way of dividing up the subject-matter of philosophical logic would be agreed upon by all of its prac-titioners, but one convenient division would be this: the-ories of reference, thethe-ories of truth, the analysis of complex propositions, theories of modality (that is, of necessity, possibility, and related notions), and theories of argument
or rational inference These topics inevitably overlap, but
it is roughly true to say that later topics in the list presup-pose earlier ones to a greater degree than earlier ones pre-suppose later ones The order of topics in the list reflects a general progression from the study of parts of *itions, through the study of whole and compound propos-itions, to the study of relations between propositions (Here we use the term ‘proposition’ to denote a thought content assessable as true or false—something expressible
by a complete sentence.) Theories of *reference are concerned with the relation-ships between subpropositional or subsentential parts of thought or speech and their extra-mental or extra-linguistic objects—for instance, with the relationship between
*names and things named, and with the relationship between predicates and the items to which they apply According to some theories, a name refers to a particular thing by virtue of its being associated with some descrip-tion which applies uniquely to that thing Other theories hold that the link between name and thing named is causal
in nature (Theories of either sort are intimately bound up with questions concerning *identity and *individuation.)
As for predicates—where a predicate may be thought of as
philosophical logic 699