A more detailed, but still uncontroversially compre-hensive, definition is that philosophy is rationally critical thinking, of a more or less systematic kind about the gen-eral nature of
Trang 1what remains when one or more names are deleted from
a sentence—these are variously held to carry reference to
*universals, *concepts, or *classes Thus the predicate ‘
is red’, formed by deleting the name from a sentence like
‘Mars is red’, is held by some philosophical logicians to
stand for the property of redness, by others to express our
concept of redness, and by yet others to denote the class of
red things Monolithic theories of reference are
unpromis-ing, however Even if some names refer by way of
descrip-tion, other names and namelike parts of speech—such as
demonstratives and personal pronouns—plausibly do
not And even if some predicates stand for universals,
others—such as negative and disjunctive predicates—can
scarcely be held to do so
*Truth and falsehood—if indeed they are properties at
all—are properties of whole sentences or propositions,
rather than of their subsentential or subpropositional
components Theories of truth are many and various,
ranging from the robust and intuitively appealing
*corres-pondence theory—which holds that the truth of a
sen-tence or proposition consists in its correspondence to
extra-linguistic or extra-mental *fact—to the
*redun-dancy theory at the other extreme, according to which all
talk of truth and falsehood is, at least in principle,
elim-inable without loss of expressive power These two
the-ories are examples, respectively, of substantive and
*deflationary accounts of truth, other substantive theories
being the *coherence theory, the *pragmatic theory, and
the *semantic theory, while other deflationary theories
include the prosentential theory and the performative
the-ory (which sees the truth-predicate ‘ is true’ as a device
for the expression of agreement between speakers) As
with the theory of reference, a monolithic approach to
truth, despite its attractive simplicity, may not be capable
of doing justice to all applications of the notion Thus the
correspondence theory, though plausible as regards a
pos-teriori or empirical truths, is apparently not equipped to
deal with *a priori or *analytic truths, since there is no
very obvious ‘fact’ to which a truth like ‘Everything is
either red or not red’ can be seen to ‘correspond’ Again,
the performative theory, while attractive as an account of
the use of a sentence like ‘That’s true!’ uttered in response
to another’s assertion, has trouble in accounting for the
use of the truth-predicate in the antecedent of a
condi-tional, where no assertion is made or implied
Whichever theory or theories of truth a philosophical
logician favours, he or she will need at some stage to
address questions concerning the value of truth—for
instance, why should we aim at truth rather than
false-hood?—and the *paradoxes to which the notion of truth
can give rise (such as the paradox of the *liar) In the
course of those inquiries, fundamental principles thought
to govern the notion of truth will inevitably come under
scrutiny—such as the principle of *bivalence (the principle
that every assertoric sentence is either true or false) A
rejection of that principle in some area of discourse is
widely supposed to signify an *anti-realist conception of
its subject-matter
*Propositions and *sentences can be either simple or complex (atomic or compound) A simple sentence typ-ically concatenates a single name with unitary predicate,
as, for example, in ‘Mars is red’ (Relational sentences involve more names, as in ‘Mars is smaller than Venus’, but a sentence like this is still regarded as simple.) One way
in which complex sentences can be formed is by modify-ing or connectmodify-ing simple ones; for instance, by negatmodify-ing
‘Mars is red’ to form the *negation ‘Mars is not red’, or by conjoining it with ‘Venus is white’ to form ‘Mars is red and Venus is white’ Sentential operators and *connectives, like ‘not’, ‘and’, ‘or’, and ‘if ’, are extensively studied by philosophical logicians In many cases, these operators and connectives can plausibly be held to be *truth-functional—meaning that the truth-value of complex sen-tences formed with their aid is determined entirely by the truth-values of the component sentences involved (as, for example, ‘Mars is not red’ is true just in case ‘Mars is red’ is not true) But in other cases—and notably with the condi-tional connective ‘if ’—a claim of truth-funccondi-tionality is less compelling The analysis of *conditional sentences has accordingly become a major topic in philosophical logic, with some theorists seeing them as involving modal notions while others favour probabilistic analyses There are other ways of forming complex sentences than by connecting simpler ones, the most important being through the use of *quantifiers—expressions like
‘something’, ‘nobody’, ‘every planet’, and ‘most dogs’ The analysis and interpretation of such expressions forms another major area of philosophical logic An example of
an important issue which arises under this heading is the question how *existential propositions should be under-stood—propositions like ‘Mars exists’ or ‘Planets exist’ According to one approach, the latter may be analysed as meaning ‘Something is a planet’ and the former as ‘Some-thing is identical with Mars’ (both of which involve a quantifier), but this is not universally accepted as correct Another issue connected with the role of quantifiers is the question how definite *descriptions—expressions of the form ‘the so-and-so’—should be interpreted, whether as referential (or namelike) or alternatively as implicitly quantificational in force, as Russell held
The fourth topic in our list is theories of *modality, that
is, accounts of such notions as *necessity, possibility, and contingency, along with associated concepts such as that
of analyticity One broad distinction that is commonly
drawn is that between *de re and de dicto necessity and
pos-sibility, the former concerning objects and their properties and the latter concerning propositions or sentences Thus,
a supposedly *analytic truth such as ‘All bachelors are
unmarried’ is widely regarded as constituting a de dicto
necessity, in that, given its meaning, what it says could not
be false But notice that this does not imply that any man who happens to be a bachelor is incapable of being mar-ried—though should he become so, it will, of course, no longer be correct to describe him as a ‘bachelor’ Thus
there is no de re necessity for any man to be unmarried,
even if he should happen to be a bachelor By contrast,
700 philosophical logic
Trang 2there arguably is a de re necessity for any man to have
a body consisting of flesh and bones, since the property
of having such a body is apparently essential to being
human
As for the question how, if at all, we can analyse modal
propositions, opinions vary between those who regard
modal notions as fundamental and irreducible and those
who regard them as being explicable in other terms—for
instance, in terms of *possible worlds, conceived as ‘ways
the world might have been’ (Although this appears
circu-lar, in that ‘possible’ and ‘might’ are themselves modal
expressions, with care the appearance is arguably
remov-able.) For instance, the claim that every man necessarily
has a body made of flesh and bones might be construed as
equivalent to saying, of each man, that he has a body made
of flesh and bones in every possible world in which he
exists However, we should always be on guard against
ambiguity when talking of necessity, because it comes in
many different varieties—*logical necessity,
*metaphys-ical necessity, *epistemic necessity, and *nomic necessity
being just four
Modal expressions give rise to special problems in so far
as they often appear to create contexts which are
non-extensional or ‘opaque’ (*non-extensionality)—such a context
being one in which one term cannot always be substituted
for another having the same reference without affecting
the truth-value of the modal sentence as a whole in which
the term appears For example, substituting ‘the number
of the planets’ for ‘nine’ in the sentence ‘Necessarily, nine is
greater than seven’, appears to change its truth-value from
truth to falsehood, even though those terms have the same
reference (No such change occurs if the modal expression
‘necessarily’ is dropped from the sentence.) How to handle
such phenomena—which also arise in connection with the
so-called *propositional attitudes, such as belief—is
another widely studied area of philosophical logic
Finally, we come to questions concerning relations
between propositions or sentences—relations such as those
of *entailment, presupposition, and *confirmation (or
probabilistic support) Such relations are the
subject-matter of the general theory of rational *argument or
*inference, whether *deductive or *inductive Some
the-orists regard entailment as analysable in terms of the
modal notion of logical necessity—holding that a
propos-ition p entails a propospropos-ition q just in case the conjunction
of p and the negation of q is logically impossible This
view, however, has the queer consequence that a
contra-diction entails any proposition whatever, whence it is
rejected by philosophers who insist that there must be a
‘relevant connection’ between a proposition and any
proposition which it can be said to entail (*Relevance logic.)
The notion of presupposition, though widely appealed to
by philosophers, is difficult to distinguish precisely from
that of entailment, but according to one line of thought a
statement S presupposes a statement T just in case S fails to
be either true or false unless T is true For instance, the
statement that the present King of France is bald might be
said to presuppose, in this sense, that France currently has
a male monarch (Such an approach obviously requires some restriction to be placed on the principle of biva-lence.) As for the notion of confirmation, understood as a relation between propositions licensing some form of non-demonstrative inference (such as an inference to the truth of an empirical *generalization from the truth of observation statements in agreement with it), this is widely supposed to be explicable in terms of the theory of
*probability—though precisely how the notion of prob-ability should itself be interpreted is still a matter of wide-spread controversy
No general theory of argument or inference would be complete without an account of the various *fallacies and
*paradoxes which beset our attempts to reason from prem-iss to conclusion A ‘good’ argument should at least be truth-preserving, that is, should not carry us from true premisses to a false conclusion A fallacy is an argument,
or form of argument, which is capable of failing in this respect, such as the argument from ‘If Jones is poor, he is honest’ and ‘Jones is honest’ to ‘Jones is poor’ (the fallacy
of *affirming the consequent), since these premisses could
be true and yet the conclusion false (Strictly, this only serves to characterize a fallacy of deductive reasoning.) A paradox arises when apparently true premisses appear to lead, by what seems to be a good argument, to a conclu-sion which is manifestly false—a situation which requires
us either to reject some of the premisses or to find fault with the method of inference employed An example would be the paradox of the *heap (the Sorites paradox): one stone does not make a heap, nor does adding one stone to a number of stones which do not make a heap turn them into a heap—from which it appears to follow that no number of stones, however large, can make a heap This paradox is typical of many which are connected with the *vagueness of many of our concepts and expres-sions, a topic which has received much attention from philosophical logicians in recent years This is again an area in which the principle of bivalence has come under some pressure
Although philosophical logic should not be confused with the philosophy of logic(s), the latter must ultimately
be responsive to considerations addressed by the former
In assessing the adequacy and applicability of any system
of formal logic, one must ask whether the *axioms or
*rules it employs can, when suitably interpreted, properly serve to articulate the structure of rational thought con-cerning some chosen domain—and this implies that what constitutes *‘rationality’ cannot be laid down by logicians, but is rather something which the formulators of logical systems must endeavour to reflect in the principles of inference which they enunciate e.j.l
A C Grayling, An Introduction to Philosophical Logic (London,
1990)
L Linsky (ed.), Reference and Modality (Oxford, 1971).
J L Mackie, Truth, Probability and Paradox (Oxford, 1973).
A W Moore (ed.), Meaning and Reference (Oxford, 1993).
W V Quine, Philosophy of Logic (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970).
P F Strawson (ed.), Philosophical Logic (Oxford, 1967).
philosophical logic 701
Trang 3philosophical novel, the: see novel, the philosophical.
philosophical practice, the ethics of Philosophical
prac-tice makes strenuous moral demands: honesty and
fair-ness to opponents in argument; an ability to tolerate
prolonged uncertainty over serious issues; the strength of
character to change one’s mind on basic beliefs, and to
fol-low the argument rather than one’s emotional leanings;
independence of mind rather than readiness to follow
philosophical fashion
Moral respect for readers and hearers requires that a
philosopher avoid non-rational persuasion, cajoling,
deriding, or otherwise manipulating them into
agree-ment Philosophy should demonstrate that we can
dis-agree profoundly over fundamentals without lapsing
from a common reasonableness That same respect
requires a philosopher to expose the structure of his
argu-ment as perspicuously as possible, so as to encourage, not
impede, its criticism
Clarity and simplicity of style, the minimizing of
tech-nical expressions, abstaining from formal apparatus when
ordinary language can be adequate, also express concern
to be understood and to let argument and evidence alone
carry the persuasive weight A turgid and obscure style
may veil real gaps in argument A pretentious style may
covertly work to disarm critical appraisal, replacing the
authority of good argument with the would-be personal
authority of the philosopher as sage
Philosophy has a serious responsibility for language It
is one of its most important custodians—obliged to
oppose terminologies that arrest or confuse thinking
Slip-shod and imprecise language loses sensitivity to
distinc-tions between reasonable and unreasonable, between
good and bad argument—in any field, including the fields
of personal and political morality To impoverish the
resources of language risks also impoverishing human
experience, denying us the words we need to articulate its
varieties
Does a stress on style and the stewardship of language
imply that philosophy is a branch of literature? In some
important ways it is literature But the rapprochement is
carried too far when a philosopher lets the imaginatively
vivid presentation of a slant on the world give it an
appear-ance of self-evidence, and deflects critical alertness from
the fact that categories have not been deduced and
rea-soned justification has been subordinated to expressing
the quasi-poetic ‘vision’
Philosophers, then, need a wholesome sense of their
fallibility It is unwise for a philosopher to aspire to the role
of expert or authority; for that works towards weakening
the critical attentiveness constantly needed from readers
*pseudo-philosophy
Max Black (ed.), The Morality of Scholarship (Ithaca, NY, 1967).
philosophy.Most definitions of philosophy are fairly
con-troversial, particularly if they aim to be at all interesting or
profound That is partly because what has been called phil-osophy has changed radically in scope in the course of his-tory, with many inquiries that were originally part of it having detached themselves from it The shortest defin-ition, and it is quite a good one, is that philosophy is think-ing about thinkthink-ing That brthink-ings out the generally second-order character of the subject, as reflective thought about particular kinds of thinking—formation of beliefs, claims to knowledge—about the world or large parts of it
A more detailed, but still uncontroversially compre-hensive, definition is that philosophy is rationally critical thinking, of a more or less systematic kind about the gen-eral nature of the world (metaphysics or theory of exist-ence), the justification of belief (epistemology or theory of knowledge), and the conduct of life (ethics or theory of value) Each of the three elements in this list has a non-philosophical counterpart, from which it is distinguished
by its explicitly rational and critical way of proceeding and
by its systematic nature Everyone has some general con-ception of the nature of the world in which they live and of their place in it *Metaphysics replaces the unargued assumptions embodied in such a conception with a rational and organized body of beliefs about the world as a whole Everyone has occasion to doubt and question beliefs, their own or those of others, with more or less suc-cess and without any theory of what they are doing *Epis-temology seeks by argument to make explicit the rules of correct belief-formation Everyone governs their conduct
by directing it to desired or valued ends Ethics, or *moral philosophy, in its most inclusive sense, seeks to articulate,
in rationally systematic form, the rules or principles involved (In practice ethics has generally been confined
to conduct in its moral aspect and has largely ignored the large part of our actions that we guide by considerations of prudence or efficiency, as if these were too base to deserve rational examination.)
The three main parts of philosophy are related in vari-ous ways For us to guide our conduct rationally we need
a general conception of the world in which it is carried out and of ourselves as acting in it Metaphysics presupposes epistemology, both to authenticate the special forms of reasoning on which it relies and to assure the correctness
of the large assumptions which, in some of its varieties, it makes about the nature of things, such as that nothing comes out of nothing, that there are recurrences in the world and our experience of it, that the mental is not in space
The earliest recognized philosophers, the Pre-Socratics, were primarily metaphysicians, concerned to establish the essential character of nature as a whole, from the first cryptic utterance of Thales: ‘All is water.’ Parmenides is the first metaphysician whose arguments have come down to us For the reasons given by the famous para-doxes of Zeno, he concluded that the world did not move and occupied all space The Sophists, by sceptically chal-lenging conventional moral assumptions, brought ethics into existence, notably in Socrates Plato and Aristotle wrote comprehensively on metaphysics and ethics; Plato
702 philosophical novel, the
Trang 4on knowledge; Aristotle on (deductive) logic, the most
rigorous technique for the justification of belief, setting
out its rules in a systematic form which retained their
intellectual authority for over 2,000 years
In the Middle Ages philosophy, in service to
Christian-ity, drew first on the metaphysics of Plato, then on
Aris-totle’s, to defend religious beliefs In the Renaissance free
metaphysical speculation revived and, in its later phase,
with Bacon and, more influentially, Descartes and Locke,
turned to epistemology to ratify and, as far as possible to
accommodate to religion, the new developments in
nat-ural science Hume argued that such an accommodation
is impossible, as indeed is metaphysics generally In
contin-ental Europe Spinoza and Leibniz practised deductive
metaphysics in the style of Parmenides and with
compar-ably astonishing results Kant, brought up in that tradition,
was shaken out of it by reading Hume, rejected
meta-physics in its traditional varieties, and ascribed the order of
the public world to the formative work of the mind on its
experiences His German successors, taking advantage of
some inconsistencies in Kant, revived metaphysics in the
grand manner In Britain the empiricism of Locke and
Hume prevailed, and epistemology remained the central
philosophical discipline up to the middle of the present
century
Metaphysics has various ways of setting about its none
too clearly formulated topic: the general nature of the
world The first is that of purely rational demonstration
In this, large and striking conclusions are arrived at by
showing that their denials involve self-contradiction A
prime example is the ontological proof of the existence of
God God is defined as perfect A God that exists is more
perfect than something, otherwise identical, that does
not Therefore God necessarily exists In the same style
Leibniz proves that reality is, in its ultimate constitution,
mental, and Bradley finds contradictions lurking in the
whole repertoire of fundamental notions of common
belief and science (relation, plurality, time, space, the self,
and so on) to arrive at the conclusion that reality is a single,
indisseverable tissue of experience, a spiritual unity in
which nature and personal individuality are absorbed
A second metaphysical procedure is to derive
conclu-sions about what lies behind ‘appearance’, the perceptible
surface of the world, about the true or ultimate reality that
transcends appearance Prime examples here are the
argu-ments for God’s existence from the world’s need of a first
cause and from the marks of intelligent design in the order
of the perceived world Even more important for the
his-tory of philosophy is Plato’s theory of Forms or objective
universals, not in space and time but in a world of their
own, invoked to explain our recognition of recurrent
properties in the flux of appearance and to serve as
the objects of eternally true items of mathematical
knowledge
Hume attacked demonstrative metaphysics on
epistemo-logical grounds Purely rational argument can establish
only the formal truths of logic and mathematics The
denial of a self-contradictory statement is not a substantial
truth of fact, it is merely verbal, reflecting conventions for the use of words Kant attacked transcendent meta-physics, arguing that the notions of substance and cause which it applies beyond the bounds of experience can yield knowledge only when applied to the raw material supplied by the senses The Logical Positivists attacked transcendent metaphysics more vehemently with their verifiability principle, contending that its affirmations are devoid of meaning since uncheckable by experience Kant also opposed a kind of metaphysics which does not so much go behind the scenes of appearance as side-ways from them by extrapolating indefinitely from them,
as in the theses that the world is infinitely large, has existed from eternity, is composed of infinitesimal parts, and so
on He paired off assertions of these kinds with their denials and argued, in apparent defiance of logic, that both members of each pair were self-contradictory This kind
of metaphysics, dealing with the quantitatively (rather than, as transcendent metaphysics does, with the qualita-tively) inaccessible, would seem open to the same objec-tions, if they are correct
Survivors of the long conflict between metaphysics and its detractors are theories of what has been called ‘cat-egories of being’ Dualism of the mental and physical, most sharply focused in Descartes, but pervasive long before and after him, is the most familiar of these It has epistemological roots One is the distinction between two kinds of experience: sensation and introspection Another
is the alleged infallibility of beliefs about one’s own mind
as contrasted with the fallibility of all beliefs about the objective material world Materialists such as Hobbes argue that mental activity is bodily, if on a very small scale Idealists such as Berkeley (and, in a way, phenomenalists such as Mill) argue that material bodies are complexes of sensations, both actual and either in the mind of God or hypothetical
The Platonic realm of ideas houses a third alleged cat-egory, that of abstractions, such as properties, relations, classes, numbers, propositions Values have been installed
as a category so as to provide something for judgements of value to be true of
Monism may be neither materialistic nor idealistic, but neutral Russell, William James, Mach, even Hume up to
a point, regarded both bodies and minds as composed of the same kinds of sensation, actual and possible, and the images that copy them The two kinds of sensation com-bine to constitute bodies; sensations and images consti-tute minds
Beside the kind of large-scale metaphysics considered hitherto, which aims at a conception of the world as a whole, there is a kind of small-scale metaphysics which examines the detailed structure of the world: individuals, their properties, and their relations to one another; the events in their history, and thus change, and also the states which are the dull, and the processes which are the more eventful, parts of that history; the facts which are the hav-ing of properties by individuals; and so on Aristotle’s doc-trine of categories set this going as an organized inquiry
philosophy 703
Trang 5(his categories being quite different from the categories of
being mentioned earlier) It has now been to some extent
absorbed into philosophical logic, since its pervasive
fea-tures of the structure of the world correspond to the
for-mal characteristics of discourse (of thought and speech)
which are assumed as the basic distinctions of formal logic
The fundamental, but not most interesting, question of
epistemology is that of the definition of knowledge Plato
addressed it in his Theaetetus and came up with the crucial
result that it is something more than true belief, although
it includes it The idea that justification is the missing
elem-ent runs into difficulties unless, as many hold, the infinite
regress it seems to generate is stopped by maintaining that
some beliefs are not justified by others, but by experience
For many philosophers, however, the problem is in itself
of little interest since knowledge is of little interest What
matters is rational or justified true belief However, it has
been persuasively suggested that the missing third
element in the definition is that the true belief should be
non-accidental or that it should be caused by the fact that
makes it true
Nearly all epistemology involves two large distinctions:
the first between what Leibniz called truths of reason and
truths of fact, the second between what is acquired directly
or immediately and what is acquired by inference Truths
of reason are necessarily true and discoverable a priori,
that is to say without reliance on the senses and purely by
thinking Truths of fact are contingent and rest on
experi-ence for their justification The two distinctions overlap
Some truths of reason must be immediate if any are to be
inferred These, primarily, are taken to be the axioms or
first principles of logic and mathematics The
conven-tional view about non-immediate truths of fact is that they
are indeed inferred, but not by deductive logic For them,
it is held, induction, the derivation of unrestricted
general-izations from a limited number of their singular instances,
is required Whewell, Peirce, and, most vehemently,
Pop-per have denied, or, at any rate, marginalized, induction
As they see it, general statements are first proposed as
hypotheses worthy of examination, then their singular
deductive consequences are examined; they are rejected if
these turn out to be false, but preserved, with increasing
confidence, the larger the number of tests they survive
This corresponds more closely to scientific practice than
does the conventional theory of induction, but has the
appearance of letting induction in by the back door
Leibniz thought that all truths of reason rested on the
law of contradiction but did not go on to conclude, as
Hume and most subsequent empiricists have, that they
are therefore analytic, in the sense that they are verbal,
simply reiterating in what they assert something they
have already assumed Kant took the central problem of
philosophy to be that of whether and how any beliefs are
both synthetic, really substantial in content, and also a
pri-ori, discoverable by reason alone He concluded that there
were such beliefs: those of arithmetic and geometry and
such ‘presuppositions of natural science’ as that there is
fixed, permanent quantity of matter in nature and that
every event has a cause He went on to ascribe the neces-sary truth of these substantial beliefs to the mind’s impos-ition of order on the chaos of experience to which it is subjected Few have followed him this far Mill held that mathematical truths are really empirical; Herbert Spencer that what seem to be necessary truths are the well-confirmed empirical beliefs we inherit from our ancestors More recently Quine has argued that there is no difference
in kind between truths of reason and truths of fact at all, only in the degree of our determination to hold on to them
in the face of discouraging evidence
The distinction between the direct and the inferred has also been challenged at various times, the present included, by philosophers who cannot see a way out of the maze of beliefs Current coherence theorists of know-ledge follow in the steps of Hegelian idealists and the Vien-nese positivists (until Tarski led them out of the maze) Part of the hold of the distinction comes from the ancient principle that our perception of objective, material things
is not direct, since it is always fallible, as shown by our liability to illusion, and so must be inferred from the sup-posedly infallible knowledge we do have of our private, subjective sense-impressions Is this inference valid, or, at least, defensible? If not, must we sceptically suspend belief
in the material world? If it is, what sort of inference is it: to more things of the same kind, actual and possible impres-sions, or to something of a different, experience-transcending kind, namely unexperienceable matter? The pattern of this problem, and the form of its possible solu-tions, has been seen to be repeated in a number of other cases The evidence for our beliefs about the past is all pre-sent, our recollections and traces; how do we cross the gap, if we can? Our beliefs about other minds are based on what we observe their bodies to do and say A solution not mentioned so far is that of denying the assumption that we are confined to the evidence specified That seems more attractive in the case of perception, where it would imply that we perceive material objects directly, although not infallibly, and in the case of our beliefs about the past,
where our recollections simply are our straightforward
beliefs about the past, not evidence for them, than in the case of other minds, where some sort of telepathy would seem needed The importance and centrality of these three kinds of belief hardly need to be stressed, not just for science, history, and psychology, but for our entire cognitive life
A curious feature about epistemology is the very slight attention it has given to the source of by far the greater part of our beliefs, namely the testimony of others: par-ents, teachers, textbooks, encyclopaedias There is an interesting problem here If we depend on them for the principles by which we check the reliability of what we are told, how do we ever achieve cognitive autonomy?
*Logic, which, as was said earlier, is the most powerful
or coercive instrument for the justification of belief, is never taken to be part of epistemology It was systemat-ically organized before epistemology had established itself
as an identifiable discipline It began as, and still partly
704 philosophy
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which apply to all kinds of thought and speech From
Aris-totle to the mid-nineteenth century it largely slumbered
Since then it has been greatly enlarged, with Aristotle’s
logic included in a mildly modified way, and has become
from one point of view a branch of mathematics Its
elem-ents have always been seen as an essential preamble to the
study of philosophy, and still are today It is not exactly a
part of philosophy, although critical reflection on its
assumptions, philosophical logic, unquestionably is
There are a large, and indeed indeterminate, number of
specialized philosophical disciplines, philosophies of this
and that—mind, language, mathematics, science (natural
and social), history, religion, law, education, even sport and
sex Where the special field is, as in the cases of science and
history, a form of the pursuit of knowledge, the
corres-ponding philosophy is primarily epistemological The
metaphysics of nature is an idea calculated to put scientists
off, although the problem of the reality of theoretical entities
such as fundamental particles could well be remitted to it
Speculative or metaphysical philosophy of history, the
elaboration of general schemes or patterns (cyclical or
pro-gressive) of the totality of historical events, is also regarded
with suspicion The rational basis for that suspicion is a topic
for the critical, epistemological philosophy of history
The *philosophy of mind, as currently pursued, began
from the epistemological problem of how we can know
what is going on in another’s mind But it has come to be
metaphysical The old problem of personal identity can be
posed either as ‘How do we know that someone existing
now is the same person as someone who existed at some
previous time?’ or as ‘What is it for a person existing now
to be identical with a person who existed before?’ If
per-sonal identity, our own as well as that of others, is not to be
inaccessible and unknowable, the two questions should
receive much the same answer
The *philosophy of science is often taken to embrace
topics which are important for pre-scientific thinking One
of these is that of the nature of causation and the
associ-ated issue of how a lawful connection is to be
distin-guished from a merely accidental concomitance Another
is that of the justification of induction and of the
interpret-ation of the probability, or kinds of probability, it confers
on its conclusions Causal relations, general beliefs, and
beliefs held to be no more than probable are all
indispens-able features of ordinary common-sense thinking
The third and final main division of philosophy is ethics,
or theory of value, the rationally critical examination of
our thinking about the conduct of life Action, as
con-trasted with mere behaviour, is the result of choice, the
comparison of alternatives, undertaken in the light of
the desirability or otherwise of their consequences and
of the possibility or easiness of doing them Two kinds of
belief, then, are involved in action: ordinary,
straight-forward factual beliefs about what is involved in doing
something and what its results will be, and beliefs about
the value of those results and, perhaps, the disvalue of
what we must do to secure them
In fact, in post-Greek ethics, the kind of action that has
monopolized attention is moral action, fairly narrowly
conceived That is probably the result of religious enthusi-asm Christianity began as a millennialist religion, indiffer-ent to worldly concerns and preoccupied with salvation, partly out of conviction of the worthlessness of the world and the flesh, even more from a belief that the world was about to end anyway Whatever the cause of this narrow vision it has had a distorting effect In principle ethics should consider all kinds of deliberate, thoughtful con-duct: prudent conduct and self-interested conduct, which aim, respectively, at minimum loss and maximum gain for the agent, technically efficient conduct, economical con-duct, healthy concon-duct, and so on Moral goodness and rightness are only one kind of rightness Logic and episte-mology, indeed, since they are concerned to distinguish right from wrong in reasoning and belief, can be described
as the ethics of inference and belief without metaphorical licence
Religious influence on morality caused it to be seen as God’s commands to mankind Since this led to problems
of authentication and interpretation, God’s voice was internalized, either as a kind of moral sense, perceiving the moral quality of actions and the characters of agents, or as
a kind of moral reason, apprehending the self-evident necessity of moral principles Two questionable assump-tions are involved in these two kinds of moral
intuition-ism The first is that moral characteristics are sui generis,
quite unrelated logically to any natural, perceivable char-acteristics of agents and their actions The second is that actions, or kinds of action, are intrinsically right or wrong, whatever consequences they may have or be expected to have Both features, if really distinctive of morality, would make it wholly different from other modes of action Utilitarians reject both the distinguishing assumptions They derive the rightness or wrongness of actions from the goodness or badness of their consequences, most plausibly from the consequences it would have been reasonable for the agent to have expected rather than from the actual consequences Secondly, they take good-ness to be pleasure or happigood-ness, more exactly the general happiness, the greatest happiness of the greatest number The doctrine would have been in closer accord with unreflective moral sentiment if it had been formulated negatively: an action is wrong if it causes harm to another,
is permissible if it does not, and is morally creditable if it prevents or alleviates the suffering of another
For all their differences intuitionists and utilitarians agree that there are objective moral truths and falsehoods The bulk and intensity of moral disagreement lend colour
to the claims of moral sceptics, who claim that moral judgements are no more than expressions of our likes and dislikes and that disagreements about moral issues are col-lisions of feeling that cannot be settled by rational means The fundamental question for ethics, conceived simply as moral philosophy, is whether our moral convictions have any objective validity and, if so, of what kind Are they, as intuitionists suppose, convictions of a unique and special
philosophy 705
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the rest of our beliefs? Are the moral properties of actions
intrinsic to them or are they dependent on the
conse-quences of action? In what does virtue or moral goodness
consist? Is it the disposition to do right actions or, more
narrowly, the disposition to do right actions just because
they are right? Under what conditions do agents deserve
blame (or praise) for their actions? Does moral
responsi-bilty presuppose freedom of the will in the sense of
free-dom from any causal influence on choice?
Two other established forms of the theory of value are
*political philosophy and *aesthetics Political philosophy
is an extension of ethics into the domain of organized
social institutions and, like ethics generally, is perhaps
over-moralized Its fundamental problem is the basis of
the moral obligation of the citizen to obey the state and its
laws, which, viewed from the other end, is that of the state
to compel the citizen to obey it (It might be more
inter-esting to inquire what it is that makes it generally
reason-able for citizens to obey.) Does the obligation to obey
depend on the content of the laws or on the way the state
was set up and is maintained? Do men have rights that
limit the morally legitimate sphere of action of the state?
Aesthetic value is recognized as distinct from moral
value despite the appearance of moral elements in
criti-cism—sometimes relevantly, sometimes intrusively It is
not very satisfactorily indicated by the word ‘beauty’
Other languages do better ‘Beau’ and ‘schön’ mean fine,
the property of objects of art or nature deserving attentive
contemplation for their own sake, independently of any
further use we may put them to or any information we
may get from studying them
The more established parts of philosophy have all been
mentioned here, but there is no evident limit to its field of
application Wherever there is a large idea whose
mean-ing is in some way indeterminate or controversial, so that
large statements in which it occurs are hard to support or
undermine and stand in unclear logical relations to other
beliefs we are comparatively clear about, there is
opportun-ity and point for philosophical reflection a.q
*Appendix: Maps of Philosophy; Appendix:
Chrono-logical Table of Philosophy; philosophy, the influence
of; philosophy, value and use of; philosophy, world and
underworld; metaphilosophy; pseudo-philosophy;
publishing philosophy; world philosophy
A J Ayer, The Central Questions of Philosophy (London, 1973).
Keith Campbell, Metaphysics (Encino, Calif., 1976).
Anthony O’Hear, What Philosophy Is (Harmondsworth, 1985).
W V Quine and J Ullian, The Web of Belief (New York, 1970).
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford, 1980).
philosophy, chronology of: see Appendix.
philosophy, history of centres and departments of.
*Philosophy is a collaborative pursuit, unlike the
medita-tive activity of sages which is commonly conceived to
flourish best in isolated or even hermetic conditions
The form of collaboration involved, however, is not
co-operative, like that of a surgical team, but competitive,
a business of critical argument Argument is meant to per-suade, and to succeed must overcome counter-argument Sages merely issue pronouncements to those who visit their retreats Philosophers, therefore, are to a large extent found in groups, as is suggested by the large number of philosophical works composed in dialogue form: most of
Plato’s, for example, Scotus Eriugena’s De Divisione Naturae, some of Berkeley’s and Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion.
The first three universally recognized philosophers— Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes—all came from Miletus, a prosperous Greek city in Ionia, on the western coast of what is now Turkey It was overwhelmed by the Persians in 494 bc Pythagoras was born in the neighbour-ing island of Samos, but removed himself—perhaps from dislike of the tyrant Polycrates, perhaps from fear of the Persians—to Croton in southern Italy, where he set up a tightly knit and disciplined school Parmenides and his fol-lowers came from Elea on the lower shin, rather than, as with Croton, the fall of the foot of Italy Anaxagoras, another Ionian, first brought philosophy to Athens, where
he lived for some thirty years around the middle of the fifth centurybc From that date until the emperor Justinian closed the Athenian philosophical schools in ad 529, Athens remained the centre of philosophy, drawing people from other parts of the Greek, and later Roman, world to it, such as the Macedonian Aristotle, as well as producing philosophers of its own, of whom the greatest was Plato The Sceptics Arcesilaus and Carneades were, at different times, heads of Plato’s *Academy Zeno, from Citium in Cyprus, and Epicurus, from Samos, the founders
of Stoicism and Epicureanism, both settled in Athens After the political collapse of Athens at the end of the fifth century bc two other great culturally significant cities developed, and philosophy was pursued there In Alexan-dria, more notable for science and mathematics than for philosophy, there were Aenesidemus, Philo Judaeus, and the great systematizers of Christian doctrine Clement and Origen Plotinus was educated there, but settled in Rome The native Roman philosophers were of a popular, liter-ary character: Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius Tertullian lived in, and
St Augustine near to, Carthage but 200 years apart, which hardly makes Carthage a philosophical centre But since Augustine did not leave it until he was 28 it must have had some philosophical culture Boethius, the last ancient philosopher, or the first medieval one, was of an ancient Roman family and lived in Italy until his execution by the Ostrogoth king Theodric
Between Boethius’ death in 525 and the active career of
St Anselm in the latter half of the eleventh century, philoso-phy outside the Arab world is almost a blank, probably as much in fact as in our knowledge of it The solitary figure
of substance in these 500 years is the Irish Neoplatonist John Scotus Eriugena He was called to the Frankish Court
of Charles the Bald in the late ninth century because of a reputation the Christian civilization of Ireland had been
706 philosophy
Trang 8able to retain until the Vikings destroyed it The
complex-ity and professional sophistication of his work and his
knowledge of Greek throw a favourable, if not very
infor-mative, light on the state of Irish culture in his time
Learning gradually revived, first in monastic schools
such as those of York, Fulda, and St Gall Of particular
philosophical interest is that of Bec, in Normandy, where
Lanfranc taught Anselm Both were Italians and both
became Archbishop of Canterbury By the beginning of
the twelfth century, around the time of Anselm’s death,
Paris emerged as the major philosophical centre William
of Champeaux, of the cathedral school there, is the first
notable figure More important was the brilliant and
charismatic Abelard, who drew great numbers of students
to the city He was followed by Peter Lombard, compiler
of the Sentences on which many medieval philosophers felt
bound to produce a commentary, and by the Victorines
By 1215 the cathedral schools of Paris were sufficiently
unified to be recognized as a university There had been
universities before, most notably at Salerno and Bologna,
but they specialized in medicine and law respectively and
were governed by their students
Rashdall descried signs of a university in Paris around
1170 By the thirteenth century it was fully fledged and
philosophically dominant The Englishman Alexander of
Hales, his pupil St Bonaventure, the German Albertus
Magnus, St Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus,
and William of Ockham, even the fourteenth-century
German mystic Meister Eckhart, all studied or taught
there, often both Oxford, where Franciscans secured a
dominance like that of the Dominicans in Paris, started
soon after Paris, but did not displace it until the fourteenth
century The Augustinian Robert Grosseteste, the first
important Oxford philosopher and first Chancellor of the
university, had Roger Bacon for a pupil, and from his time
until the Black Death in 1348 Oxford was the home of a
host of productive philosophers The first of these to be of
major significance was Duns Scotus, who shared with the
largely very different William of Ockham a conviction of
the impotence of reason in the supernatural domain That
marked Oxford off from the Paris of Aquinas, who held
and copiously expressed the opposite view
Oxford declined as a philosophical centre after the
mid-dle of the fourteenth century The persistent heresies of
Wyclif, its ablest late fourteenth-century philosopher,
bringing down ecclesiastical repression, completed the
work done by the Black Death The Ockhamist tradition
survived in Paris with John Buridan, Albert of Saxony,
Nicole d’Oresme, and the combatively sceptical Nicholas
of Autrecourt With Gerson, who died in 1429, who used
Ockham’s nominalism to support mystical conclusions,
the first great age of Parisian philosophy came to an end
The first centre of the new Platonic humanism of the
Renaissance was the Academy in Florence, founded in
the mid-fifteenth century by Cosimo dei Medici, under the
inspiration of the Byzantine Gemistus Pletho and his pupil
Cardinal Bessarion and with Ficino and Pico della
Miran-dola as its most gifted members The Florentine Academy
had more influence on literature and culture generally than on philosophy proper Much more philosophically important was the University of Padua, site of a protracted controversy between two schools of interpreters of Aris-totle: the Alexandrists (Pomponazzi, Zabarella, Cre-monini) and the Averroists Padua had been taken over by Venice in 1403; its thinkers benefited from the firm resist-ance of the parent city to papal interference Galileo was Professor of Mathematics at Padua from 1592 to 1610 There was some philosophical vitality in Spain in the sixteenth century, notably at Salamanca, the chief figures being Vittoria and the great, last-ditch systematizer of scholasticism: Suarez But in France and England there was little going on in the religious turmoil of the sixteenth century as Protestantism was suppressed in the former and Catholicism in the latter There was an active group of young English humanists at Oxford early in the sixteenth century, assembled around the visiting Erasmus, Colet, Thomas More, and Grocyn Its interests were largely theological and after ten years its members went off in different directions For most of the sixteenth century there was no philosophical centre of note
From this time until the mid-eighteenth century in Germany and Scotland and the mid-nineteenth century in France and England the universities were largely torpid Interesting philosophers were all independent men of let-ters But there were some significant informal groupings The most eminent of these was the circle of the abbé Mersenne, who served as a link between Descartes, Pascal, Gassendi, Arnauld, and Hobbes, recruiting the last three to write critical comments on Descartes’s
Meditations Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understand-ing was the outcome of a discussion group considerUnderstand-ing
questions of morality and revealed religion, which proved
to need a philosophical foundation But, for the most part, Locke worked alone, as did Spinoza and Leibniz, Berkeley and Hume In Cambridge, a little earlier, there had been the circle of Platonists led by Cudworth and Henry More
Holland was not exactly a philosophical centre in the seventeenth century, but major philosophers flourished there, despite a measure of persecution: Spinoza above all and Hugo Grotius Equally important, Holland, because
of its comparative tolerance of unorthodox religious opin-ions, was much favoured as a place of refuge for philoso-phers from France and England who were, or reasonably thought they would become, objects of oppression: Descartes early in the century, Locke and Bayle later Hume at least had the beneficent social setting of eight-eenth-century Edinburgh and the friendship of Adam Smith During his lifetime the Scottish universities came
to life intellectually, keeping him out but taking in to the professoriate Hutcheson, Ferguson, Adam Smith, Reid and Dugald Stewart So did the universities of Germany There were a great many of them, none, after the brief ini-tial glory of Halle, particularly predominating That may
be the cause, if it is not the effect, of the characteristically dogmatic and authoritarian character of German
philosophy, history of centres and departments of 707
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allow for, critical exchange
The most attractive philosophical centre of the
eight-eenth century was the world of the *philosophes in Paris,
agreeably anchored to the material world by the salons of
Mme d’Holbach and Mme Helvétius D’Holbach and
Diderot were the philosophically most substantial of the
group; Voltaire and Rousseau were, in different degrees,
spiritually and, for the most part, physically remote The
contemporary drinking-clubs of Edinburgh performed a
similar service in an even more philosophically marginal
way In England the circle around Bentham, animated by
James Mill and culminating in J S Mill, was a more
aus-tere kind of salon
Kant, notoriously, spent his entire life in the spiritual
Siberia of Königsberg Fichte and Hegel were at Jena and
Berlin (Schelling was also briefly at Berlin, as
Schopen-hauer had been even more briefly) Schleiermacher was
active in Berlin through the whole Hegelian period After
the middle of the nineteenth century German
philoso-phers seemed to be spread broadly over the universities of
the whole country Lotze was at Göttingen, where
Herbart had finished his career Cohen and Natorp were
at Marburg, Windelband and Rickert at Heidelberg,
lead-ing the two neo-Kantian schools Dilthey and Cassirer
both wound up in Berlin after various wanderings Wundt
was at Leipzig, Brentano at Vienna This monadic
organi-zation of philosophy continued into the present century,
with Husserl at Göttingen and then Freiburg im Breisgau,
where his pupil Heidegger supplanted him
By the middle of the nineteenth century, when German
philosophy was fully professionalized, it was just taking
the first steps in that direction in Britain and France The
concentration of the French university system on Paris
has persisted to the present day, with nearly every
philoso-pher of note winding up there sooner or later In Britain, as
Scottish philosophy petered out with the death of
Hamil-ton in 1856, its doctrines were kept going with style and
professionalism in Oxford by H L Mansel Soon after his
death in 1871 the idealist school of T H Green, Bradley,
and Bosanquet quickly expanded and penetrated the rest
of the country with the partial exception of Cambridge
(for there were idealists there too, McTaggart, Ward, and
Sorley, for example) But the latter soon gave way to the
realists Russell and Moore after 1903, and they, in turn, in
the 1930s, to Wittgenstein (*Oxford philosophy;
*Cam-bridge philosophy.)
Cambridge had made little contribution to philosophy
in the Middle Ages, although it had come into existence
very soon after Oxford However, under the Tudor
mon-archs its former Protestantism had secured royal favour
and, while Oxford slept, it produced Bacon and, later in
the sixteenth century, the Cambridge Platonists with their
massively learned reaction to Hobbes In more recent
times Cambridge, where philosophy has been studied as a
full-time specialized subject, has always had many fewer
students of philosophy than Oxford, where it has always
been studied in conjunction with other subjects
Never-theless the two universities achieved philosophical profes-sionalism at much the same time, in Cambridge with Whewell, John Grote, and finally Sidgwick Then, from about 1900, there was an extraordinary efflorescence Four philosophers of outstanding gifts—Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey—enabled Cambridge to domi-nate English philosophy until after the Second World War, despite the overwhelming numbers of their less inspiring Oxford colleagues When Oxford philosophy revived, it was through the work of Cambridge-influenced Oxford philosophers: Price, Ryle, and Ayer With these three, together with Austin and Strawson, Oxford took the lead and attracted visiting American philosophers in the first few post-war decades to such an extent that one of them reasonably described it as ‘a philo-sophical boom town’ But since about 1970 the direction
of movement has been reversed
The universities of America were not much more than high schools or seminaries until well into the nineteenth century Before that the only centre had been the Boston area, where Emerson and the Transcendentalists were to
be found (*Transcendentalism.) There was a great period
or golden age at Harvard from about 1890 up to the First World War, in the epoch of James, Santayana, and Royce, and with Peirce in the background Another, still in progress, began at the end of the Second World War (*Harvard philosophy.) Dewey presided over an active department at Columbia, in the inter-war years the official headquarters of pragmatism Berkeley, Princeton, and Michigan have been important departments since the 1940s This period has been one in which a Germanic sys-tem of scattered local heroes has been largely overcome
by the dominance of a few major centres, above all Har-vard Recently, after a period in which it either produced
or drew to itself a very large proportion of the most highly regarded American philosophers, Harvard has suffered by the departure from the scene, either by death or retire-ment, of most of these leading figures: Quine, Goodman, Putnam, Nozick, and Rawls, who have not been replaced
by quite such magnetic people A new centre appears to be developing in the New York metropolitan area, embra-cing Columbia and New York University in the city itself and Princeton and Rutgers in neighbouring New Jersey
a.q
*pragmatism
Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophers (Cambridge, Mass.,
1998)
B Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000 (Oxford,
2001)
J H Newman, Rise and Progress of Universities in Historical Sketches
(London, 1873), i
philosophy, literary genres of.Philosophers have often been reluctant to admit that what they write is, in a sense, literature Plato, a great poet, had the poets expelled from his Republic Nevertheless, philosophy has been written through the centuries with regard to literary form and in accordance with various literary genres
708 philosophy, history of centres and departments of
Trang 10The dialogue was more or less invented by Plato and
was used by him with unsurpassed mastery But it has
been used by other philosophers as well Cicero in his
philosophical dialogues imitated Plato Berkeley, Hume,
and Schelling (among others) used the form in more
recent times The dialogue serves to make clear that
phil-osophy essentially is debate, controversy, dialectical
argument
The commentary is also a venerable genre It was used
in antiquity by e.g Proclus in his influential commentaries
on Plato Among Arabic philosophers it was a favourite
genre Al-Farabi and Averroës became famous for their
commentaries on Plato and Aristotle, and through them
influenced later Latin medieval philosophy But the
com-mentary did not lose its importance with the waning of
scholasticism Even in modern times commentaries on
Kant (Cohen, Cassirer, Bennett), on Hegel (McTaggart,
Kojève, Hippolyte) or on Marx (Lukács, Althusser) have
had an important impact Philosophy feeds on
philoso-phy New interpretations of major thinkers open up new
vistas
The intellectual autobiography is useful for showing
why a certain line of argument has seemed plausible or
even necessary to the author and for bringing out the
interplay between ideas and personalities Plato’s Seventh
Letter, Augustine’s Confessions, Descartes’s Discourse on the
Method, Mill’s Autobiography, and Popper’s Unended Quest
could be mentioned here
The short article is a genre adapted to the specialized
philosophical journal of modern times Within analytical
philosophy the short article has suited the idea that the
aim of philosophy is piecemeal problem-solving rather
Berel Lang, The Anatomy of Philosophical Style (Oxford, 1990).
philosophy, the influence of The most direct influence
of philosophy has been the speculative initiation, and
incubation within itself, of other intellectual disciplines:
physics and mathematics from the early Greeks, Christian
theology from Plato, Plotinus, and Aristotle, law from
Hobbes and Bentham, economics and psychology from
Locke, Hume, and the Utilitarians, criticism from
Aris-totle and Kant This is really too intimate a relation to be
described as influence and is, accordingly, a little more
fully discussed in this Companion under the heading
philosophy, the value and use of.
The main influence, properly speaking, of philosophy
has been to underlie and, to a considerable extent, to
inspire a great number of significant movements of
thought embodying attitudes to man and society and, as
bearing on them, nature and the universe at large The
first of these is *Stoicism, whose ideals of fortitude,
cos-mopolitanism, and public service suited the traditional
outlook of the Romans and served them well as the
work-ing ideology of their world empire
More profound and lasting was the influence of the
philosophies of Plato, and, even more, Plotinus, on the
elaborate and sophisticated system of Christian theology
with which the Fathers of the Church transformed an intellectually rudimentary kind of dissident Judaism into the operative faith of the Western world for a millennium and a half With the recovery of Aristotle for the West in the twelfth century, Augustine’s Neoplatonic theology was greatly modified by Thomist *scholasticism, but was revived by the Protestant Reformation, which was to a large extent anti-philosophical, despite the part played in its emergence by men trained in philosophy: Wyclif, Luther, Calvin, and Melanchthon
The rejection of Thomist rationalism by Ockham, and his confinement of rational knowledge to the empirically intuitable natural world, led his followers, notably Buridan and Oresme, to anticipate the great scientific flowering of the seventeenth century with theories of inertia and a mechanical conception of nature A renewed study of Plato was at the centre of the preoccupation of the leading figures of the Renaissance with the human soul Descartes, although finally overwhelmed by Newton, for some time took a dominant place in the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, in which, like Leibniz, he directly participated
The application of ‘the experimental method of reason-ing to moral subjects’ practised by Hobbes and Hume (and so described by the latter) was too scandalous in its first appearance to have much immediate influence Locke, in whom empiricism and Gassendi’s materialism were mitigated by borrowings from Descartes, in effect invented *liberalism He exerted a major influence on the
*philosophes of eighteenth-century France by way of Voltaire They cleared the ground for the French Revolu-tion by their criticisms of absolute monarchy and its ideo-logical instrument, the Church But it was Rousseau who was to inspire the extreme, Jacobin phase of the Revolu-tion In the United States Locke was taken over wholesale and was honourably plagiarized in the Declaration of Independence As the ideologist of the Glorious Revolu-tion of 1688, he was not without honour at home His principles were invoked by the Whig governments which were dominant through most of the eighteenth-century in Britain; wholly until the accession of George III in 1760 and from time to time until the start of a long period of Tory rule in 1784
*Romanticism was heavily dependent on philosophy Its emphasis on emotion and liberation (especially of cre-ative spirits) derived from Rousseau Its notion of a higher, non-analytic kind of reason was taken from the post-Kantians, Fichte, and Schelling, most directly by Coleridge Of romantic affiliation was Herder’s notion of the unique individuality of particular peoples The nation-alism this implied was more aggressively affirmed by Fichte and bureaucratized by Hegel, with some marginal borrowings from Rousseau and Burke The way was prepared for the rampant nationalism of the nineteenth century and the erosion of dynastic absolutism
In Britain, where national identity had been assured, with some help from geography, for 400 years, the emphasis was on reform, intensified by the effects of
philosophy, the influence of 709