The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 74 ppt

Finally, philosophy, in a popular sense of the word, has aimed to satisfy a widespread popular need, typically by way of guidance in the conduct of life from Socrates, the Stoics, and th

urbanization and the growth of industry The

*utilitarian-ism of Bentham and the Mills discarded the natural-rights

liberalism of Locke and reached back to the starker

doc-trines of Hobbes and Hume Marx depended on Hegel,

even if he turned him upside-down, basing history on

man’s material and economic life rather than on the

progress of Spirit Schopenhauer and Nietzsche rejected

the rational optimism of the Enlightenment, respectively

accepting and glorifying the will and preparing the way for

all kinds of anti-rational excess in belief and practice

In the wasteland of modernity a host of belief systems

largely untouched by philosophy sprang up, like the

orien-tal religions of imperial Rome: *fascism, nudism,

*vegetar-ianism, parapsychology, environmentalism *Feminism

broke away from its demure nineteenth-century liberal

form, along with parallel movements for the

emancipa-tion of homosexuals and animals Psychiatry turned from

Freud’s sombre recognition of the dependence of

civiliza-tion on the control of instinct to ecstatic doctrines of the

total liberation of impulse If not inspired, all this was at

least abetted by philosophies such as *existentialism and

*post-structuralism which proclaimed the inescapable

arbitrariness of choice, the death of man, and the inherent

self-deceivingness of any kind of rationalism

English-speaking analytic philosophers, notably Russell and

Pop-per, both widely read by non-philosophers, sustained the

battered programme of the Enlightenment, arguing for

the continuing liberalization of constraining institutions:

education, marriage, property, and the state a.q

*philosopher may preach; pseudo-philosophy; Marxist

philosophy; Platonism; Thomism

philosophy, maps of: see Appendix.

philosophy, popular: see popular philosophy.

philosophy, pseudo-: see pseudo-philosophy.

philosophy, radical: see radical philosophy.

philosophy, teaching: see teaching philosophy.

philosophy, the value and use of The direct value and

use of philosophy is either intrinsic or educational

Intrin-sically it satisfies, or seeks to satisfy, the intellectual desire

for comprehensive knowledge or understanding We

approach the world and the management of our lives

within it with a miscellany of more or less unconnected

beliefs, preferences, and habits of action, largely acquired

from or imposed by others There is a natural, if by no

means universal, desire to order this material

systemat-ically, to find out how all the bits and pieces fit together,

and to achieve theoretical and practical autonomy by a

critical sifting and purification of the beliefs and

prefer-ences with which we find ourselves equipped To be

philosophically inclined is to want to make one’s

convic-tions systematic and authorized by ourselves by way of

critical reflection on what we might otherwise take for

granted It is to pursue a rationally founded conception of the world and system of values and, as a pre-condition of that, an understanding of what we really know or have good reason to believe That is an idealized picture, no doubt, but it defines the intrinsic value and use of philoso-phy in terms of its aims, if not altogether in terms of what

is achieved

Educationally the direct value and use of philosophy is its emphasis on *argument or *reasoning These are to be found, of course, in the study of any intellectual discipline, pretty much by definition But the proportion of argu-ment to data argued from is much higher than in any other study, apart from mathematics And the data of philoso-phy are much more concrete and various in kind than those of mathematics Philosophy starts from the com-monest and most elemental items of common knowl-edge: that there are material things, past events, and other people, and that we have, or seem to have, knowledge of them It goes on to ask whether that is so and what is required if our supposed knowledge is to be possible Phil-osophy can claim, on this account, to be a good training in self-critical rationality and a valuable accompaniment to any study in which reasoning plays an important part, but

is not explicitly reflected on In so far as the study of phil-osophy includes the study of its history it can provide some acquaintance with the overall shape of the large movements of the mind in history It often does this badly

by disconnecting past philosophers from each other and from their intellectual environment

Philosophy also has indirect uses The most important

of these has been that of first nurturing and then setting free other disciplines (often with a familiar kind of parental reluctance and retentiveness) Physics and mathematics proper (as distinct from mere reckoning in trade or sur-veying) derived from early Greek cosmology Christian theology, in successive phases, was the child of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle Scientific psychology and economics developed from associationist and utilitar-ian philosophies of mind and action Jurisprudence emerged from various kinds of political philosophy (from the Stoics, Bacon, and Hobbes), as did political science Philosophy at least played some part in the transformation

of history from mere chronicle into explanatory narrative and has tempted it at times into metahistorical system-atization of history as a whole In the present epoch linguistics has largely extricated itself from the maternal embrace of philosophy

Finally, philosophy, in a popular sense of the word, has aimed to satisfy a widespread popular need, typically by way of guidance in the conduct of life (from Socrates, the Stoics, and the Epicureans onward) or, where there is no scope for guidance, as with the inevitability of death and other blows of misfortune, by way of consolation, for the most part more austerely than religion does (*Popular

*Lumber of the Schools; bladders of philosophy; divine philosophy; fingering slave; clip an angel’s wings

710 philosophy, the influence of

philosophy, women in: see women in philosophy.

philosophy and literature: see literature and philosophy.

philosophy and ordinary language: see ordinary

lan-guage and philosophy

philosophy and psychology: see psychology and

philosophy

philosophy and real life.Claims by one philosophical

trad-ition to capture real life better than another presuppose

further claims concerning what it is about reality that

phil-osophy should aim to capture Traditional metaphysics

bears the mark of *Parmenides’ conclusion that there is no

real change in the world In the light of the One, the life

that does change is lost to view or dismissed as illusory

The complaint that philosophy has treated its questions at

too abstract a level is often laid at the door of *Plato’s

appropriation of *Socrates, for whom philosophy was an

activity designed educatively to recast questions rather

than provide any answers When *Kierkegaard asked his

philosophy teacher what relation philosophy had to actual

life, it was with the thought that this long-standing trend

should be reversed That philosophical questioning

begins with the ‘existing’ individual is the view of

existen-tialists, whose reaction to the tradition culminating in

*Hegel was led by Kierkegaard himself Whereas he

focused on philosophers’ attempts to capture within a

closed system something that is essentially open-ended,

later critics were concerned to replace the traditional

vocabulary with one that better maps the contours of life

as it is lived *Existentialism thus re-situated philosophy

by replacing its impersonal viewpoint with a subjective

one, and the methods of philosophical reasoning with a

descriptive approach claiming to do better justice to life

itself Some *linguistic philosophy may be said to be

informed by a similar aim This shift of viewpoint

con-trasts with *Marxist philosophy’s quasi-scientific

socio-economic focus and with the generalizing tendencies of

philosophical *anthropology, but also with the approach

of ‘applied’ philosophy which focuses on the ethical

dilemmas of professional and political life Employing

traditional methods of reasoning, this draws on an

armoury established by philosophy’s recent analytic past

and on standard versions of the more enduring moral

theories Apart from generating large and specialized

litera-tures, *bioethics and *business ethics have contributed to

a public image of the philosopher as a professional among

others, and of philosophy itself as a service industry of use

in formulating guide-lines for ethically acceptable

behav-iour In this endeavour what counts is less any special

philosophical insight than an ability inherited from

analytic philosophy to give debates a manageable and

J Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life (London, 2003).

A Hannay, ‘What Can Philosophers Contribute to Social

Ethics?’, Topoi (1998).

D Moran and T Mooney (eds.), The Phenomenology Reader

(Lon-don, 2002)

philosophy and science How are *philosophy and sci-ence related to one another?

I It has often been claimed that the method of reasoning

adopted by modern science is the method of reasoning that philosophy should also adopt in dealing with at least

some of its problems Thus Hume subtitled his Treatise of Human Nature ‘An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental

Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects’ It was as if he took his sceptical philosophy to be a pioneering contribu-tion to what we should now call experimental

psych-ology Similarly on Quine’s view, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York, 1969), 82–3, epistemology

should be regarded ‘as a chapter of psychology and hence

of natural science’ because it studies ‘a natural phenom-enon’ Specifically, according to Quine, it studies a physical human subject that receives as input a sequence

of patterns of irradiation in assorted frequencies and delivers as output a description of the three-dimensional external world and its history

We need to ask the following question, however: how much of the procedures adopted by physicists, chemists, biologists, etc., since ad 1600 or thereabouts is to count here as a part of the method of natural science? Kant described himself, in the preface to the second edition of

his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (tr N Kemp Smith (London,

1929) ), 21–3, as seeking to put metaphysics ‘on the sure path of a science’ He thought that via his critical method metaphysics could achieve the same level of consensual certainty as that which was supposed to belong to the mathematics and physics of his time In the reformed metaphysics it would no longer be possible to construct pairs of arguments that were both apparently sound yet had mutually opposed conclusions But this would not make metaphysics a branch of mathematics or physics

Similarly Russell held, in his History of Western Philosophy

(London, 1946), 862–4, that in the practice of philosoph-ical analysis (as, for example, in his own philosophy of mathematics) a method of procedure is used that resem-bles scientific reasoning in respect of its ability to achieve definite, consensually acceptable answers for certain problems and therewith successive approximations to the understanding of a whole field of inquiry But Russell’s claim was not as bold as that of Hume and Quine In par-ticular he did not share their view that the extent of the resemblance between philosophical and scientific method included a shared use of controlled experiment and

obser-vation Popper too has theorized, in his Conjectures and Refutations (London, 1963), 198–200, that like any science

philosophy must first proceed by the isolation of a prob-lem and then by the proposal and criticism of a hypothesis for the problem’s solution But he does not expect an epi-stemological theory of this nature to be empirically

refutable How could he expect it to be empirically

refutable if the subject-matter that might refute it does not belong either to the mental or to the physical world but to

philosophy and science 711

what, in Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach

(Oxford, 1972), 107–9, he calls ‘the third world of

prob-lems, theories and arguments’? Again Comte, in his Cours

de philosophie positive (Paris, 1830), i 2–56, held it to be a

fundamental law of mental development that both

com-munities and individuals pass from a ‘theological or

ficti-tious state’ into a ‘metaphysical or abstract state’ and from

the latter into a ‘scientific or positive’ one And it is from

Comte’s use of the term ‘positive’ in this connection that

*‘positivism’ has come to be the name given to any

philo-sophical theory that assigns a dominant intellectual role to

empirical science But Comte’s view was that

metaphys-ical thinking should be replaced by scientific thinking, not

that metaphysical thinking should consist in a kind of

scientific thinking

Many philosophers have implicitly or explicitly rejected

any such scientistic paradigm Certainly the sceptical

trad-ition cannot easily be reconciled with this conception of

philosophy If you deny that knowledge is possible, then

a fortiori you deny that any paradigm of knowledge exists.

If genuine science is beyond human capacity, it is pointless

to urge philosophers to imitate it Indeed, when Socrates

claimed to know nothing but his own ignorance, he was

scorning those of his contemporaries who claimed to

know more than this Nor can philosophy stand in

unbiased judgement over the principles and assumptions

of the sciences if it is itself one of them: for example, in

Plato’s Republic, book 7, the author’s conception of

philoso-phy—under the name of *‘dialectic’—as an architectonic

discipline left no room for it to take geometry, arithmetic,

or one of the other sciences as its paradigm Moreover,

against Russell’s thesis that philosophy should proceed

like a science, there stands the emphasis placed by some

other analytical philosophers, like Ayer in his Language,

Truth and Logic (London, 1946), 33–70, on the importance

of the difference between *analytic and synthetic

propos-itions, with the conclusions of philosophical inquiry being

said to be characteristically analytic while the conclusions

of physical, chemical, or biological inquiry are said to be

characteristically synthetic The former articulate the

implications of a word’s or phrase’s meaning; the latter

describe features of objects And, whereas scientific

conclusions need always to be based on valid reasoning

from appropriate premisses, there are philosophers, like

Samuel Alexander and Derrida, who purport to spurn all

attempts at philosophical reasoning Alexander claimed,

in his ‘Some Explanations’, Mind (1931), 423, to ‘dislike

argument’ And Derrida has said, in ‘Limited Inc abc’,

Glyph (1977), supplement, 56, that he detests discussion,

subtleties, and ratiocinations

II In the face of so much disagreement the best way

for-ward is to seek out those features in which philosophy

does seem to resemble a natural or social science and

those in which it does not

For example, it is scarcely to be denied, even if it verges

on platitude to assert, that both types of inquiry involve

the solution of intellectual problems In particular cases

they may involve the solution of practical problems also, but this is not a necessary feature On the one side, for a sci-entist, to know what causes a given process is very often also to know how to produce it But practical knowledge does not accompany theoretical if the process caused is the explosion of a supernova On the other side, if as a philoso-pher one accepts an appropriate type of analysis of *per-sonal identity, one may have acquired thereby the ability

to reconcile oneself to a loved one’s apparent death Per-haps people are really immortal, so that reflection on the relevant philosophical analysis provides a technology of consolation But others who accept the same analysis may nevertheless be inconsolable A well-constructed analysis

of logical entailment may assist the task of persuading someone to acknowledge the validity of a long and subtle argument But others may still be unable to grasp it Again, the results of scientific inquiry are always expected to be consistent with one another overall, and so too are the results of philosophical inquiry In either case any inconsistency is regarded as a fault or inadequacy, and functions as a sign of where more work needs to be done More interestingly, perhaps, it is worth noting that, as

in science, so too in philosophy both deductive and induct-ive patterns of argument are to be found Thus on the one

hand Descartes, in his Discours de la methode (Leiden, 1637), part v, sought to deduce the existence of God from certain self-evident first principles, and Ryle, in The Concept of Mind (London, 1949), 8, claimed to be mainly using *reduc-tio ad absurdum arguments On the other hand the

move-ment of philosophical thought is often inductive rather than deductive This occurs when the validity of some general principle is supported by an appeal to involuntary intuition in a particular kind of case For example, Bernard

Williams, in his ‘Moral Luck’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1976), 117 ff., declares that his ‘procedure in

gen-eral will be to invite reflection about how to think and feel about some rather less usual situation, in the light of an appeal to how we—many people—tend to think about other more usual situations’ Again Quine, for example in

his Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 157–61,

defends his hostility to logical modalities, intentional objects, and subjunctive conditionals by appeals to the logical intuitions that this or that utterance may provoke

And Putnam, in his ‘Mind, Language and Reality’, in Philo-sophical Papers (Cambridge, 1975), ii 224, tells a

science-fiction story to evoke an intuition about the use of the term ‘water’ on a look-alike planet earth in order to support the thesis that the meaning of a scientific term

is never just a function of the speaker’s psychological state

Important features of dissimilarity, however, are also to

be found

In science the data that support inductive conclusions are data that emerge, albeit involuntarily, from experi-ment or observation, not from intuition or intellectual conscience Correspondingly, whatever the field of their research, scientists are expected to achieve consensus, and the history of modern science is full of such achievement

712 philosophy and science

Moreover, this expectation is embodied in accepted

pat-terns of institutional endorsement, i.e in the publication

of universally respected textbooks, in elections to official

academies, and so on Nor could science progress through

teamwork, as it often does, unless consensus were the

norm

But, where two philosophical theories oppose one

another, that opposition is not necessarily seen as showing

that one or both of the theories must be faulty In this way

philosophy is perhaps more like art than like science An

art gallery is the richer for the fact that it possesses

paintings in the realist style as well as in the impressionist

one Our culture also profits analogously from the

oppos-ition between philosophical realism and philosophical

idealism, albeit philosophical theories are constructed

with the help of language and argument, not of canvas and

paint, and convey an outlook on intellectual or social

issues, not on visual ones

Moreover, philosophy often has a normative aspect,

which science lacks Thus scientists set out to describe

some aspect of how the world is, or of why it is so, or of

what can be done to change it But philosophers often set

up ideals of how intellectual inquiry should proceed, or of

what rationality requires, or of which socio-economic

objectives should animate legislation Roughly, while

science can often supply knowledge of means, it is for

philosophy to discuss the choice of fundamental ends

III Despite the important differences that exist between

science and philosophy, each has had an important

influ-ence on the other For example, the readiness of

philoso-phers to question any customary assumption, or to

explore any interesting speculation, has sometimes

helped to open up new avenues of scientific inquiry or to

provoke major revolutions in scientific theory Empiricist

theories of meaning, like Hume’s, when mediated

through the work of Mach, had a part in creating the

climate of ideas in which it was possible for Einstein to

regard the concept of absolute simultaneity as

meaning-less Truth-functional analyses of implication, like the

Stoics’, are ancestors, via Boole’s mathematical logic, of

the systems of logic-gates that are essential to digital

com-puters But there is also the possibility that interest in

methodological or epistemological problems may

some-times divert a scientist—especially a young and

inexperi-enced one—from working on substantive scientific issues

Conversely, major new developments in science tend

to pose new problems for philosophers Thus the triumph

of quantum theory in physics sets new puzzles for those

who investigate the structure of scientific explanation,

since familiar deterministic assumptions seem no longer

tenable And new medical technology has generated

many new problems in medical ethics with regard to the

use of life-support mechanisms, organ transplants,

experi-mentation on patients, choice of an infant’s sex, etc

Moreover, in addition to such interconnections

between particular scientific developments and particular

philosophical ones, the general notion of scientific

progress has also been linked—sometimes positively and sometimes negatively—with philosophical attitudes Thus Utilitarians like John Stuart Mill have looked to science for a technology of happiness and have therefore been especially keen that the social sciences should emu-late, wherever possible, the style and method of the nat-ural sciences and attain a comparable level of success at prediction and explanation And even though a *deonto-logical ethics does not normally require assistance from science in order to achieve the realization of what it val-ues, it does not repudiate such assistance either

Some philosophers, on the other hand, have actually adopted a negative attitude to science, or part of science,

as normally conceived Sometimes this attitude rests on the claim that a superior science is relevant, such as a philosophically argued metaphysics or a creationist alter-native to Darwinian *biology Sometimes it rests instead

on the claim that modern science is itself to be blamed for all the environmental pollution that its users have gener-ated But neither claim is well founded Not a single con-sequence of an alternative epistemology has ever been generally accepted by all those who repudiate or despise modern experimental science And the sources of envir-onmental pollution are all to be traced to the activities of those who misuse scientific knowledge, not to the activi-ties of those who discover it

IV Even if philosophy is not a kind of science, nor a rival

of science, and even if it has had differences from science that are crucial to its nature, it may nevertheless be conve-niently thought of, like science, as a species of know-ledge—the self-knowledge of reason At least three kinds

of knowledge are then recognized Science gives us sys-tematic, institutionally warranted, and technologically exploitable knowledge of the uniformities and probabil-ities in our natural and social environments Everyday knowledge informs us about the immediately obvious fea-tures of the facts that confront us And philosophy pro-vides knowledge of the fundamental principles and assumptions in accordance with which we reason It is that kind of knowledge which is provided when a paradox

is discovered, discussed, and resolved; when some form of

*scepticism is proposed or refuted; when the body–mind interconnection is investigated; when the nature of math-ematical proof is clarified; when foundations of moral or aesthetic value are established; when the possibility of the world’s being subject to the control of an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent deity is examined; and so on Against this view of the relationship between science and philosophy a number of objections may be urged One possible objection is that belief is about matters of fact, as in science or everyday awareness, whereas phil-osophy is often concerned with rules, norms, values, or ideals But again the premiss is false Beliefs are not always about matters of fact For example, one can claim to

believe that a *modus ponens type of argument is

necessar-ily valid or that children should be taught to read and write

by the age of 7

philosophy and science 713

A second possible objection is that if philosophy does

not, like science, aim at consensus it cannot be a species of

knowledge But there is a confusion here Certainly it

would be self-contradictory to say of one person that he

knows that p and of another that he knows that not-p But

it is quite admissible to say of one person (whether in

sci-ence, in everyday experisci-ence, or in philosophy) that he

thinks that he knows that p and of another that he thinks

that he knows that not-p—just as one painter or art critic

may think that he knows the superiority of realism and

another may think that he knows the superiority of

impressionism In other words to seek philosophical

knowledge is to seek consensus, in that philosophers use

argument in order to persuade one another of the

correct-ness of their view But a wise philosopher does not expect

that philosophical consensus will ever be achieved, except

locally and in the short run So he does not expect that his

arguments on a philosophical issue will be as cogent as

those of a competent scientist on a scientific issue

Thirdly, it might be said that philosophy cannot be

a species of knowledge that ought to be classified

co-ordinately with scientific knowledge since a

suffi-ciently advanced neuroscience, matching software to

hardware, could itself provide consensual knowledge

about the fundamental principles and assumptions in

accordance with which we reason In other words, it will

be said, a sufficiently detailed knowledge of the human

brain’s genetically controlled architecture will reveal the

structure of our thinking ability So philosophy is just a

variety of scientific knowledge

But that is to suppose the existence of a fully

determi-nate, genetically programmed system of principles and

assumptions, with no room for major variation in

accord-ance with cultural inheritaccord-ance or individual choice

*Evolution would instead have given the human species a

survivally more valuable endowment if the genetically

programmed system constituted only a loose framework

within which a variety of alternative patterns of reasoning

were possible, with the choice or construction of a

particular pattern being settled in accordance with the

perceived needs of the situation Thus it may be tempting

to suppose, for example, that people have an innate

abil-ity, which a well-developed neurology could explain, to

learn to calculate arithmetically in the scale of 10 But in

fact the ancient Greeks and Romans, and early medieval

Europeans, had no such ability because their arithmetic

lacked the number 0

How are these vast areas of conceptual space, left

neuro-logically indeterminate by genetic programmes, to be

filled and used? Much of this great task is achieved by the

unreflective endeavour of scientists or of intelligent people

building on the inherited achievements of their forebears

But there is also room for philosophers to contribute

through the critical and reflective exploration of

alterna-tive options And neuroscience cannot take on this task

because, even if a neuroscientist were able to detect the

patterns of reasoning preferred by particular philosophers,

he would still be left with the task of criticizing and

evaluating those patterns That is, he would still need, in important respects, to operate as a philosopher l.j.c

*science, history of the philosophy of; science, prob-lems of the philosophy of

J Burnet, Greek Philosophy: Thales to Plato (London, 1914).

E A Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science

(London, 1932)

L J Cohen, The Dialogue of Reason (Oxford, 1986).

R G Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford, 1940).

T Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford, 1986).

M Schlick, The Problems of Philosophy in their Interconnection

(Dor-drecht, 1987)

philosophy and theology: see theology and philosophy.

philosophy and the public In an old Monty Python sketch on television, two teams of philosophers play a football match The German idealists are competing against a squad of ancient Greeks for an undisclosed hon-our But the game is a disaster because all the players wad-dle around scratching their beards rather than engaging with the ball Such is philosophy’s public image in Britain—philosophers are comic, their concerns inscrutable, and their capacity for recommending courses

of action even to themselves terribly limited To some members of the public, at least, philosophers remain as socially useless as Cratylus, the Hericlitean who found the world so perplexing that he was reduced to silently wag-ging a finger

Behind the satire, though, there is a real disappoint-ment that broadly empiricist philosophers seem tempera-mentally unable to answer purportedly profound and profoundly romantic philosophical questions that press themselves on the public—about the meaning of life, the nature of time, how to lead the good life Even Stephen Hawking has rebuked philosophers for allegedly aban-doning the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant in favour of the mere analysis of meaning

Julian Baggini suggests that the public’s disappoint-ment in philosophers now stems from a misconception

‘Carrying around some weird image of philosophers as New Age gurus or spiritual leaders, they don’t seem to realise that the vast majority of modern philosophy is technical, specialised and about as relevant to the con-cerns of everyday life as theoretical physics.’

No wonder, then, that anxious members of the public, seeking happiness or the meaning of life, take succour in glib answers to questions that some professional philoso-phers might regard as strictly senseless The extent to which the public buys books by non-philosophers

pur-porting to be philosophy, such as Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder or Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton, is

perhaps a good measure of the need for such succour Worse yet, traditionally philosophical problems have been appropriated in considerable measure by charis-matic academics from other disciplines who have have achieved much public success with popular books Thus the nature of time has been tackled by physicists, and

714 philosophy and science

consciousness by evolutionary biologists and quantum

theorists Often such appropriations have been regarded

as disastrous over-simplifications by professional

philoso-phers But when pitted against the showmanship of the

evolutionary biologist Steven Pinker or the gusto of the

zoologist Richard Dawkins, the compunctions of

philoso-phers, and their concern that scientists’ answers

some-times elide what makes a particular problem fascinating or

at least difficult, are likely to be about as compelling to the

public as an all-philosophers’ football match

In part, philosophy’s public-relations problem is to do

with the current dearth of philosophers who are good

public performers This is hardly a purely British problem,

if it is a problem at all: the late John Rawls, for instance,

was an impeccably reticent American academic, but in the

age of the mass media this dignified reticence may well be

taken as intolerable Perhaps one thing that philosophy

needs to improve its public image is a few charismatic

monsters of egotism—a latter-day Russell, for instance—

but monsters who are good on telly

This PR problem applies primarily to anglophone

phil-osophy In France, to take one example, deference to

philosophers is such that Pythonesque satire is all but

inconceivable One might well ask why An answer might

well take in the following points In France, there is a

trad-ition of the philosophe engagé, one who gets rather noisily

involved in public affairs and who can perform his or her

thoughts compellingly in newspapers or on TV One need

only think of Sartre or Bernard-Henri Lévy to get the idea

Across the Channel, too, philosophical work, such as it is,

often has a romantic tenor that is publicly compelling It

may well be seductive to the public that Heidegger dealt

with the question of being, a matter of great pomp and

mystique; rather less sexy is an anglophone analytical

phil-osophy that deals with questions of meaning And yet,

even when a continental philosopher such as Jacques

Der-rida engages with what are primarily linguistic matters,

his tilting at the windmills of meaning has a romantic

flourish that makes what he does publicly appealing and

superficially comprehensible Everyone thinks they know

what he means by ‘deconstruction’, and many suppose it

to be a grand philosophical project of the kind that

anglo-phone empiricists seem incapable of pursuing

What future for anglophone philosophers seeking a

public role? One suggestion is that they can serve as

intel-lectual firefighters, called in to quell blazing rows that are

the result of muddled thinking or sloppy arguments over

such issues as abortion, euthanasia, cloning, and war

Whether there is a public demand for them to perform

Julian Baggini, Making Sense: Philosophy behind the Headlines

(Lon-don, 2002)

Alain de Botton, Consolations of Philosophy (London, 2002).

Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge,

1981)

Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World, tr Paulette Moller (London, 1996).

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (London, 1988).

Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London, 1946).

philosophy and war: see war and philosophy.

philosophy of education: see education, history of the

philosophy of; education, problems of the philosophy of

philosophy of history: see history, history of the

philoso-phy of; history, problems of the philosophiloso-phy of

philosophy of language: see language, history of the

phil-osophy of; language, problems of the philphil-osophy of

philosophy of law: see law, history of the philosophy of;

law, problems of the philosophy of

philosophy of life: see life, philosophy of.

philosophy of mathematics: see mathematics, history of

the philosophy of; mathematics, problems of the philoso-phy of

philosophy of mind: see mind, history of the philosophy

of; mind, problems of the philosophy of

philosophy of religion: see religion, history of the

phil-osophy of; religion, problems of the philphil-osophy of

philosophy of science: see science, history of the

philoso-phy of; science, problems of the philosophiloso-phy of

philosophy of social science: see social science,

philoso-phy of

philosophy: world and underworld Ideas which either violate important canons of reasoning or which are simply far out and unfamiliar are frowned upon by some philoso-phers and are assigned by them to a philosophical under-world Examples are concerns about black and white magic, revivals of alchemical and occult systems, off-shoots of psychoanalysis and of C G Jung’s psychology, large parts of New Age thinking, certain versions of femi-nism, general views surrounding astrology, unclear ideas proposed by scientists (Bohr’s idea of complementarity or Kuhn’s idea of incommensurability), and so on

However, speaking of an underworld of *philosophy assumes that there is a world of philosophy, i.e a

well-defined and more or less uniform domain of discourse

and/or activity Such worlds do indeed exist Every school

of philosophy that has not yet started falling apart has the unity required by the assumption But it seems doubtful that the collection of all schools, at all times and in all places, or even the sum total of today’s philosophy depart-ments at Western universities shares ideas and standards that are sufficiently substantial to define a world and a cor-responding underworld

We have no comprehensive studies of the matter; how-ever, there exists strong anecdotal evidence undermining any sort of uniformity No self-respecting British philoso-pher would try to revive the idea, found in Augustine, that the harmonious musical intervals represent truth in a way

philosophy: world and underworld 715

inaccessible to human reason The Herder of the Ideen was

beyond the pale for Kant, Kant for the Nietzsche of the

Antichrist, Hegel for Schopenhauer, the Wittgenstein of

the Investigations for Russell, Tarski for the Wittgenstein

of the Investigations, and all of traditional philosophy for

the founders of the Vienna Circle and the practitioners of

deconstruction All these ideas are now held (by

Anglo-American philosophers) to belong to philosophy proper

and are deposited in its history Making them measures of

philosophical excellence we obtain an ‘underworld’

devoid of content

And this is exactly as it ought to be Both in the West

and elsewhere philosophy started out as a universal

criti-cism of earlier views (in Greece the earlier views were

those of the Homeric epics) The gradual subdivision of

research and its professionalization left philosophers with

two options: to become specialists themselves or to

con-tinue dealing with and being nourished by all human

ideas, efforts, procedures In the first case we do get

under-worlds—but there will be different underworlds for

differ-ent schools (in the sciences the situation is the same;

molecular biologists have an underworld that differs from

that of, say, cosmologists and certainly from the

under-world of some sociological schools) An honest

profes-sional philosopher would therefore say: ‘Being a positivist

[for example] I reject Jung’s idea of a collective

uncon-scious’ and not: ‘Jung is philosophically absurd’ In the

sec-ond case we move beysec-ond the domain of academic

philosophy into a form of life that excludes nothing

though it does not hesitate to make definite suggestions

*pseudo-philosophy

phrastic:see neustic and phrastic.

phrone¯sis.Practical *wisdom In ancient Greek the term

(frequently interchangeable with sophia) has connotations

of intelligence and soundness of judgement, especially in

practical contexts In Aristotle’s ethics it is the complete

excellence of the practical intellect, the counterpart of

sophia in the theoretical sphere, comprising a true

concep-tion of the good life and the deliberative excellence

neces-sary to realize that conception in practice via choice

R Sorabji, ‘Aristotle on the Rôle of the Intellect in Virtue’,

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1973–4); repr in A Rorty

(ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (Berkeley, Calif., 1980).

physicalism. The doctrine that everything is physical

Also called *materialism, the view is associated with

Dem-ocritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Hobbes, Holbach, T H

Huxley, J B Watson, Carnap, Quine, and Smart

Phys-icalists hold that the real world contains nothing but

mat-ter and energy, and that objects have only physical

properties, such as spatio-temporal position, mass, size,

shape, motion, hardness, electrical charge, magnetism,

and gravity Exceptions are sometimes made for *abstract

entities such as numbers, sets, and propositions

The principal argument for physicalism is the success of physics Physicists have been able to explain a large and diverse range of phenomena in terms of a few fundamen-tal physical laws The principle that the properties of larger objects are determined by those of their physical parts is confirmed daily The physical basis of celestial phe-nomena was recognized in the seventeenth century, that

of chemistry in the eighteenth, and of biology in the nine-teenth The neurophysiological basis of psychology has become increasingly apparent in the twentieth century The principal objections to physicalism have come from theology, epistemology, and psychology Theological objections stem from the widespread belief in supernat-ural, immaterial gods, and in special creation and life after death Epistemological objections come from idealist or phenomenalist philosophers such as Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Mill, who hold that our ideas or sense-data are the only objects of direct perception, from which they conclude that everything must reduce to the mental Psychological objections have been especially acute since Descartes, whose *dualism still has many vigorous adher-ents The basic objection is that thinking, emotions, and sensations seem utterly unlike length, mass, and gravity And physiologists are far from specifying neural states per-fectly correlated with even one mental state Physicalists respond either by denying the existence of the allegedly non-physical phenomena (*eliminative materialism), or by arguing that it must really be physical (reductive material-ism; also *identity theory; *behaviourmaterial-ism; *central-state

C Gillett and B Loewer (eds.), Physicalism and its Discontents

(Cambridge, 2001)

D Hull, Philosophy of Biological Science (Englewood Cliffs, NJ,

1974)

D M Rosenthal (ed.), The Nature of Mind (Oxford, 1991).

physicalism in the philosophy of mind Physicalism in the philosophy of mind is an application of the general metaphysical thesis of physicalism, namely the claim that everything in the space-time world is physical Concern-ing the sphere of the mental, then, physicalism claims that all the facts about minds and mentality are physical facts

This claim is usefully divided into two parts: ontological physicalism, which holds that there are no mental

particu-lars, all the individuals of this world being physical

partic-ulars and their aggregates, and property physicalism, which

holds that all properties of these individuals are physical properties

Ontological physicalism excludes such putative entities

as immaterial souls, Cartesian mental substances,

‘entelechies’, and ‘vital forces’ If all physical entities (e.g all physical particles) were taken away from this world, nothing would remain—not even an empty space-time framework This contrasts with Cartesian substance dual-ism according to which minds are substances of a special kind and could in principle exist even if nothing material existed Many ontological physicalists, however, reject the reductionist view that all properties had by physical

716 philosophy: world and underworld

systems are exclusively physical properties; they hold the

dualist thesis that complex physical structures, like

bio-logical organisms, can have irreducibly non-physical

properties, such as *consciousness and *intentionality, two

properties often taken to be constitutive of mentality This

is what is known as non-reductive physicalism, a position

that combines physical monism with property dualism In

contrast, property physicalism, or reductive physicalism,

holds that all properties of physical systems are either

phys-ical properties or reducible to them; that is, in so far as

men-tal properties are genuine properties of physical systems,

they must be reducible to physical properties

A general characterization of ‘physical property’ is a

diffi-cult, and controversial, matter; for the present purposes, we

may skirt this general issue by taking as our paradigmatic

physical properties the fundamental properties and

magni-tudes of theoretical physics (e.g mass, energy, charge) and

properties definable or reducible in terms of them

*Emergentism is a form of non-reductive physicalism

On this view, when a physical structure reaches a certain

level of structural complexity, it comes to exhibit novel,

*emergent properties, most notably life and

conscious-ness, whose occurrences are unpredictable and

inexplic-able on the basis of its physical constituents and the laws

that govern them A majority of those who hold a

func-tionalist view about mentality, too, think of themselves as

non-reductive physicalists; for, according to them, mental

properties and kinds are functional—perhaps

computa-tional—properties and kinds defined in terms of input and

output, not physico-chemical ones or biological ones

Non-reductive physicalism has been the most influential

position on the *mind–body problem since the 1970s

However, it has recently come under attack by reductive

physicalists on the ground that it is not able to account for

mental causation, and that it supports an incorrect view of

the interlevel relationships of the sciences

Most non-reductive physicalists acknowledge the

priority of physical properties and physical laws, at least in

the following sense (‘the *supervenience thesis’): the

physical character of a thing determines its whole

character, including its mental character That is, there

could not be two objects, or events, exactly alike in all

physical respects and yet differing in some mental respect

The principal argument against reductive physicalism

has been the *variable (or multiple) realizability of mental,

and other higher-level, properties Pain, for example, may

be ‘realized’ in humans by the activation of C-fibres (let us

say), but in different animal species (perhaps also in

elec-tro-mechanical systems) we must expect different

phys-ical mechanisms to subserve pain In fact, there may be no

upper bound to the possible realizers of pain in all actual

and possible systems If this is true, pain cannot be

identi-fied with any single physical kind This point holds

gener-ally, it has been argued, for all higher-level properties,

including biological properties in relation to

physico-chemical properties (See *functionalism; reductionism.)

However, those who reject reductive physicalism for

this reason, hold the thesis that mental and other

higher-level properties can be realized only by physical proper-ties This view can be called ‘realization physicalism’, and

it can explain why mind–body supervenience obtains; it entails that physically identical systems realize the same higher-level properties, including mental properties Real-ization physicalism, even if it may fall short of full reduc-tive physicalism, is a strong physicalism position Another objection to reductive physicalism is based on the frankly dualist claim that, given their distinctively

men-tal character, menmen-tal properties simply could not be

phys-ical properties Even if, say, pain should turn out to have a single neural-physical correlate across all organisms and

other possible pain-capable systems, how could the painful-ness of pain be a neurobiological property? In moving from

the mental to the physical, we lose, it has been argued, what is mental about mental properties, such as their quali-tative character and their subjectivity In this vein, it has been argued that for physicalism to be true, conscious events and processes must be shown not to be ‘over and above’ physical-biological processes, and that showing this requires showing that physical-biological facts of this world must logically entail facts about consciousness But this cannot be shown, it has been argued in a manner rem-iniscent of the dualist arguments of Descartes, since we can perfectly well conceive of a world just like the actual world but one in which no consciousness exists and human-like creatures in it are mindless *‘zombies’, and hence such a world is a logically possible world This argument remains

*Mary, black and white

D Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (New York, 1996).

J Fodor, ‘Special Sciences, or the Disunity of Science as a

Work-ing Hypothesis’, Synthese, 28 (1974).

C Gillett and B Loewer (eds.), Physicalism and its Discontents

(Cambridge, 2001)

S Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass., 1980).

D Papineau, Thinking about Consciousness (Oxford, 2002).

J J C Smart, Philosophy and Scientific Realism (London, 1963).

physics, philosophical problems of Most of these are

distinctly metaphysical, and arise from attempting to take

seriously the picture of the world provided by modern physics Typically what philosophers of physics do is to employ recent thinking in metaphysics, about the *iden-tity of indiscernibles, *dispositions, *causality, *time, etc.,

to inform our understanding of modern physics—though they frequently argue for revising current metaphysical thought as well However, philosophers of physics are

also concerned with the more general epistemological

prob-lems of philosophy of science, like the underdetermin-ation of theory by empirical data or the status of unobservable entities For such problems come into sharp focus when posed in the context of particular physical the-ories (e.g string theory) or particular theoretical entities (e.g quarks), bringing the hope that these problems may

be better understood—perhaps even resolved

The involvement of philosophy in physics is not new Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Mach, and Poincaré, to

physics, philosophical problems of 717

name but a few classical physicists, all couched their ideas

about the physical world in philosophical, as well as

quan-titative, terms But the intermingling of philosophy with

physics has become even more apparent with the

emer-gence of the kind of abstract theories that have come to

dominate physics in this century

For example, as a prelude to establishing in his special

theory of relativity that simultaneity is not an objective

concept independent of an observer’s state of motion,

Einstein needed to ‘clear the way’ by giving an

epistemo-logical critique of the methods observers can use to

estab-lish whether spatially separated events are simultaneous

And Einstein cleared the way for his general theory of

rela-tivity by arguing (from the way that gravity affects

objects independently of their size or make-up) that an

object’s motion under gravity is indistinguishable from

the motion it would be seen to have, in the absence of

gravity, from the perspective of an observer accelerating

past it (Einstein’s celebrated ‘principle of equivalence’)

Similar epistemological critiques, for example of the

pro-cedures by which we can determine both the position and

momentum of a particle (the *uncertainty principle),

were formative in the early development of *quantum

mechanics

In light of this, it is unfortunate that many physicists

today regard philosophers as having little to contribute to

the advance of physics; either because the problems that

capture their attention are too mundane or idiosyncratic

to be relevant, or because philosophers are perceived to

lack the necessary mathematical training for settling

fundamental issues

Nevertheless, the twentieth century has given rise to a

‘new breed’ of physically trained philosophers in close

contact with the technical side of physics and how it affects

philosophical issues: like how to reconcile the tendency of

macroscopic systems to approach equilibrium over time

with the underlying time-reversal invariance of physical

laws; how to make sense of removing the infinities

pre-dicted by quantum field theory by ‘renormalizing’; and

whether a plausible formulation of the ‘cosmic

censor-ship’ hypothesis holds true in general relativity so that

*determinism can be safeguarded against naked

singular-ities Reichenbach was probably the first of this new

breed, though since then the philosophers that

immed-iately spring to mind are Earman, Fine, Grünbaum,

Malament, Redhead, Shimony, Torretti, and van Fraassen

Two examples will serve to indicate the capacity

mod-ern physics has to impinge on both metaphysics and

epis-temology Both examples will again be drawn from the

special and general theories of *relativity (but *quantum

mechanics is also relevant)

The relativity of simultaneity in special relativity affects

traditional metaphysical views about the nature of time;

in particular, the view that only events occurring in the

present (or past) are real, while events in the future are not

yet ‘fixed’, or have yet to come into being At the moment

two observers in relative motion pass, their differing

stand-ards of simultaneity will force them to disagree on what

events are in the ‘future’ and what are in the ‘past’ So, on the traditional view, they would have to disagree on which events are real, even when they (momentarily) occupy the same point in space! The obvious way to reinstate agreement is for the observers to say that only those events which can causally influence the event of the observers’ coincidence are real, since relativity predicts that both observers will necessarily agree on events those are (*Space-time.) But this will now make what events are real dependent upon the particular spatial location of the observers’ coincidence! Hence some (e.g Putnam) have argued that any objective, ontological distinction between ‘present’ (or ‘past’) and ‘future’ events must be abandoned

General relativity’s prediction that space can fail to obey the axioms of Euclidean geometry naturally leads to the epistemological question how we can know which geom-etry is applicable to our universe Imagine a world of two-dimensional creatures confined to a flat disk of finite radius who are using measuring-rods to try and determine the geometry of their world Suppose there is a temperature gradient on the disk which makes all measuring-rods expand or contract equally, with the gradient suitably arranged so that rods shrink to zero length as they approach the disk’s periphery Then from their measure-ments the creatures will get the distinct impression that they live on a plane of infinite extent with a

‘Lobachevskian’ geometry Of course, if they knew how the temperature of the disk was affecting their rods, the creatures could redescribe their situation as Euclidean But since they are forever confined to the disk, there is no way

of checking So apparently they can either assume their

instruments behave in a straight-forward way and adopt a

more complicated geometry, or assume that the geometry

is simply Euclidean and adopt a more complicated physical story about their expanding–contracting rods Hence some (e.g Poincaré and Reichenbach) have argued, using

this disk parable, that which geometry is appropriate to our

universe can only be a matter of convenience r.cli

R Boyd, P Gasper, and J D Trout (eds.), The Philosophy of Science

(Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pt ii, sect 1: ‘The Philosophy of Physics’

M Redhead, Physics for Pedestrians, Cambridge University

Inaug-ural Lecture (Cambridge, 1988)

—— From Physics to Metaphysics (Cambridge, 1993).

L Sklar, Philosophy of Physics (Boulder, Colo., 1992).

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni (1463–94) Italian philosopher who developed a form of syncretism accord-ing to which all systems of thought and belief could be rec-onciled on the basis of their shared truths Although no philosophy or religion was entirely bereft of such truths, Christianity held a privileged position, acting as the stand-ard by which all other truths were judged At the age of 23

he challenged all comers to debate 900 Conclusiones

embodying his attempts to reconcile such apparently incompatible trends of thought as Scotism and

*Thomism, *Kabbalah and Christianity The alleged

718 physics, philosophical problems of

heterodoxy of some theses led to a papal condemnation

and a brief period of imprisonment His project to produce

a full-scale harmonization of *Platonism and

*Aris-totelianism was cut short by his early death, with only

De Ente et Uno (1491), dealing with metaphysics, reaching

F Roulier, Jean Pic de la Mirandole (1463–1494): Humaniste,

philosophe et théologien (Geneva, 1989).

picture theory of meaning An account of the nature of

*meaning central to Wittgenstein’s early philosophy, but

which he later largely or entirely rejected In attempting to

understand the relation between language and world,

Wittgenstein was struck by the analogy with picturing or

modelling Different coloured counters, variously

arranged, might be used in a courtroom to model a

motor-ing accident, for instance Superficially, the counters may

not resemble the physical objects they model, any more

than propositions resemble the world; but propositions

may still depict states of affairs, provided there are as many

distinguishable elements within the proposition as within

the situation it represents, so that the proposition possesses

the appropriate pictorial form to be isomorphic to the state

of affairs Pictorial form may not be evident on the surface,

but will always be revealable by deep analysis j.l

L Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with Eng tr D F.

Pears and B F McGuinness (London, 1961)

pictures.In aesthetics, following classical writers, a picture

has been taken to be a mimesis, a *representation of reality

But the word ‘representation’ here at once suggests the

question which has absorbed recent writers Do pictures

denote as sentences or words denote? If they do, they must

do so through conventions Or do pictures resemble their

objects? Either view faces problems Why do artists accept

with alacrity a new way of painting a wheel in motion if the

new device is merely conventional? If pictures represent

because they resemble their objects, how can a picture

rep-resent a mythological being? Flint Schier proposed a

the-ory which he describes as ‘generative’ Once you grasp that

a picture represents the President then you can recognize

the objects of any other pictures which use the same style

of depiction Thus we can then acquire a grasp of the

method of representation from a single example; in this

way learning to understand pictorial representation is

quite unlike language-learning r.a.s

E H Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London, 1963).

Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, 1985).

Flint Schier, Deeper into Pictures (Cambridge, 1986).

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Washington, DC, 1987).

piecemeal engineering Popper thought that politics

should proceed by piecemeal social engineering rather

than by large-scale reform or revolution Because any

pol-icy will have unforeseen and often unintended

conse-quences, we should only change institutions bit by bit

and monitor carefully the effects of so doing This is

doubtless sensible advice, but regarding political activity

purely in terms of piecemeal engineering presupposes a consensus on aims and goals not characteristic of pluralist

*conservatism; pluralism

K R Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (London, 1945).

pietism.Pietism, the religion of Immanuel Kant, spring-ing from Lutheranism, influencspring-ing Wesley, and itself influenced by *Calvinism and the Mennonites,

empha-sized conversion, salvation, and personal morality In Pia Desiderata (1675) Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705)

casti-gated corrupt conditions in the Church, and proposed various reforms He and his followers were mocked as

‘pietists’, Spener said, by ‘those who feared through such holiness to have their own deeds put to shame’ j.j.m

D Brown, Understanding Pietism (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1978).

pineal gland This small protrusion in the centre of the brain is, in Descartes’s notorious theory of mind–body interaction, singled out as the ‘principal seat of the soul’ When the gland is stimulated by the *animal spirits flow-ing through the nerves and brain, the soul residflow-ing in the gland will have a certain kind of sensation; conversely, when the soul wills a movement, it is able to transmit

instructions to the body via the gland (Treatise on Man

(1633) ) Critics have standardly objected that positing a

location for these supposed psychophysical transactions

hardly removes the difficulty in seeing how an entirely immaterial substance can initiate, and respond to, physical

Virgil Aldrich, ‘The Pineal Gland Updated’, Journal of Philosophy (1970); repr in G Moyal (ed.), René Descartes: Critical Assess-ments (London, 1991), iv.

placebo. A pharmacologically inert substance adminis-tered blind to a control group as a way of testing the active substance as a treatment for illness Allegedly, the patient’s belief in the effectiveness of a drug or treatment often brings about a cure or improvement in itself—the ‘placebo effect’ This creates a bind which calls out for philosophical therapy There may be certain conditions (warts, say) where no treatments are effective unless the patient has faith in them How can someone who recognizes this fact

be cured? Suppose I am a warty sceptic who is realist enough to realize that if I firmly believe the warts will go, then they will How can I cultivate that belief without sell-ing my critical soul? So far my consultants assure me I can-not avail myself of what may be the only known cure unless I surrender to irrationality Know yourself and die! Whoever said rationality had survival value? j.e.r.s

plagiarismis not just a problem for university professors

It is the conceptual brother of *forgery: both are defined in terms of an artefact (e.g a poem) not being genuine, but being represented as genuine, and so represented with the intention to deceive Genuineness has to do with authorship, or source of issue, and, roughly speaking, the

plagiarism 719