In reply, it has been claimed that just as the eye cannot see itself, so the self, understood as a subject of awareness, cannot be aware of itself as an object.. *Parfit introduces distin
Trang 1emphasis he places on *consciousness as an intrinsic
fea-ture of the mind, put him at odds with behaviouristic,
functional, and other materialistic theories of mind For
Searle, although the mind emerges from the body, it
pos-sesses an ineliminable subjective character with which
materialistic accounts cannot adequately deal In relation
to this claim, he uses his famous *Chinese room argument
to show that even though a ‘system’ (a computer and a
person) inside a room can manipulate Chinese symbols, it
does not necessarily operate on the level of meaning To
do that, mental (intentional) concepts need to be
J R Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge, 1969).
—— The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
secondary qualities: see primary and secondary qualities.
seeing as In his later writings, Wittgenstein showed an
interest in the phenomenon to which the Gestalt
psycholo-gists had drawn attention, of seeing (or hearing, or, )
something as something The *duck-rabbit is an example: a
picture that can be seen either as a duck or as a rabbit Part
of Wittgenstein’s interest in this phenomenon had to do
with his rejection of a nạve account of *perception; he took
the interpretation of what is seen to be less separable from
seeing itself than empiricist philosophers had been wont to
think But perception was not his only concern We see one
continuation of a number-series as ‘more natural’ or
‘sim-pler’ than another; see one grouping of objects in a class as
‘cutting Nature at the joints’, another not; and so on Our
use of concepts depends on ‘seeing as’ r.p.l.t
*illusion, arguments from
L Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr G E M.
Anscombe, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1967)
self.The term ‘self ’ is often used interchangeably with
*‘person’, though usually with more emphasis on the
‘inner’, or psychological, dimension of personality than on
outward bodily form Thus a self is conceived to be a
sub-ject of consciousness, a being capable of thought and
experi-ence and able to engage in deliberative action More
crucially, a self must have a capacity for *self-consciousness,
which partly explains the aptness of the term ‘self ’ Thus a
self is a being that is able to entertain first-person thoughts
A first-person thought is one whose apt expression in
language requires the use of the first-person pronoun ‘I’,
or some equivalent *indexical expression However, it
may not be right to insist that a self be capable of
express-ing its thoughts in language—even its first-person
thoughts Happily, we possess locutions for ascribing
first-person thoughts to others without implying that they are
capable of articulating those thoughts One such locution
is the ‘he himself ’ construction Thus if I ascribe to Fred
the thought that he himself is fat, I ascribe to him a thought
whose apt expression in English by Fred would be ‘I am
fat’, though I do not imply that Fred is capable of so
expressing that thought Note that we must distinguish
this thought from a similar third-person thought that Fred
might have about himself, whose apt expression in Eng-lish by Fred might be ‘Fred is fat’ or ‘That person is fat’ (the latter said by Fred in reference to a person he sees reflected
in a mirror, not realizing that it is himself that he sees)
It is plausible to require of a self not only a capacity to entertain first-person thoughts but also the possession of certain kinds of first-person knowledge For example, it seems right to insist that a self must know, of any of its pre-sent, conscious thoughts, experiences, and actions, that
they are its own This is why the response of Mrs Grad-grind (in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times), when asked on
her sick-bed whether she was in pain, strikes us as so bizarre: ‘I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room, but
I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.’ Our possession
of such self-knowledge is connected with the phenom-enon of ‘immunity to error through misidentification’ (Sydney Shoemaker) An example involving memory is provided by the apparent absurdity of supposing that I might accurately remember (as it were, ‘from the inside’)
a meal in a restaurant attended by a number of people, and
yet be in some doubt about whether I was one of those
people (As against this, however, Derek Parfit has argued that we could in principle inherit ‘quasi-memories’ from other people, including first-person ‘memories’ of what they, but not we, had done.)
So far we have largely been concerned with the meaning
of the term ‘self ’, that is, with the essential characteristics
of selfhood But metaphysicians are also interested in
exploring the nature of the self, that is, what sort of *thing
the self is, if indeed it is a ‘thing’ at all In traditional terms,
a distinction may be drawn between substantival and non-substantival theories of the self, the former contending that the self is a *substance, either physical or non-physical, the latter that it is a mode of substance Philosophers like Hume, who regarded the self as ‘nothing but a bundle of different perceptions’, effectively treat the self as belonging
to the category of modes A problem with the Humean approach is that perceptions—that is, thoughts and experi-ences—seem to depend for their identity upon the identity
of the selves who possess them, which implies that
percep-tions are modes of selves and hence that the latter have the status of substances vis-à-vis their thoughts and
experi-ences, rather than being reducible to them e.j.l
*homunculus
D Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984).
S Shoemaker, Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity (Ithaca, NY, 1963).
B Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge, 1973).
self, bundle theory of the: see bundle theory of the self.
self-consciousness.One view of self-consciousness would
be that it is the *consciousness of a special kind of object,
‘the *self’ In reply, it has been claimed that just as the eye cannot see itself, so the self, understood as a subject of awareness, cannot be aware of itself as an object Accord-ing to Schopenhauer, for example, the suggestion that a
860 Searle, John R.
Trang 2subject can be an object to itself would be ‘the most
mon-strous contradiction ever thought of’ More cautiously, it
might be argued that the core of the intuitive notion of
consciousness is what might be called introspective
self-awareness, and that one cannot be introspectively aware of
oneself as an object Sydney Shoemaker’s defence of this
view of introspective self-awareness is to point out that in
those cases in which one might be said to be conscious of
oneself as an object—seeing oneself in a mirror, for
example—one always has to identify the presented object
as oneself Since identification always carries with it the
possibility of misidentification, first-person statements based
on such awareness are not ‘immune to error through
mis-identification’ relative to the first-person pronoun Yet, it
seems to be a requirement on introspective self-awareness
that it is capable of grounding first-person statements that
are immune to this kind of error
To say that a statement of the form ‘I am F’ is immune
to error through misidentification relative to the
first-person pronoun is to say that the following is not possible:
one knows that someone is F, but one’s statement is
mis-taken because, and only because, the person one knows to
be F is not oneself For example, if one were to judge ‘I am
in pain’ on the basis of feeling pain, it could not happen
that the person one knows to be in pain is not oneself If
self-ascriptions of mental states are immune to error
through misidentification, then the awareness on which
they are based may be introspective, but could not be
awareness of oneself as an object
Kant expressed this point by saying that the self as it is in
itself cannot be ‘intuited’ or perceived by means of *inner
sense Since, for Kant, knowledge of an object requires both
a concept and an intuition of it, he concluded that
know-ledge of the self as it is in itself is impossible Kant did not,
however, accept the Humean idea that there is no more to
self-consciousness than consciousness of subjectless mental
occurrences Instead, he argued that consciousness of self
consists in an ability to ascribe one’s thoughts and
experi-ences to oneself The self-ascription of experiexperi-ences was in
turn claimed to require experience and knowledge of
objects other than oneself A variation on this suggestion is
the idea, associated with P F Strawson, that for one to be
able to ascribe experiences to oneself, one must also be able
to ascribe them to subjects other than oneself
A somewhat different approach would be to claim that
self-consciousness necessarily involves awareness of one’s
own body Since bodily self-ascriptions such as ‘My legs
are crossed’ appear to be immune to error through
misidentification when based on awareness of one’s own
body ‘from the inside’, this makes it plausible that such
awareness is a genuine form of self-consciousness If
bod-ily awareness is also awareness of oneself as an object, then
Shoemaker’s argument may not, after all, be decisive
On the other hand, some have argued that the
peculiari-ties of bodily awareness are such as to cast doubt on the
idea that it is awareness of oneself as an object The
sug-gestion that self-consciousness requires bodily awareness
*introspection
J L Bermúdez, The Paradox of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge,
Mass., 1998)
Q Cassam (ed.), Self-Knowledge (Oxford, 1994).
G Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, 1949).
S Shoemaker, Identity, Cause, and Mind, expanded edn (Oxford,
2003)
—— The First-Person Perspective and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1996).
P F Strawson, Individuals (London, 1959).
L Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford, 1958).
self-control.Traditionally, a capacity to conduct oneself
as one judges best when tempted to do otherwise
Self-control is the contrary of weakness of will or *akrasia Aristotle distinguishes self-control (enkrateia) from temperance (so¯phrosune¯) The latter, a moral virtue, is
possessed only by individuals who have no improper or excessive desires regarding bodily pleasures and pains; self-controlled individuals have such desires, but they characteristically resist them, acting as they judge best On more recent views, self-control may be exhibited in any sphere in which motivational states compete with a per-son’s values, principles, or practical judgements, including practical and theoretical reasoning and the gathering and assessment of evidence for motivationally attractive or unattractive hypotheses (e.g the hypothesis that one is popular or that one’s spouse has been unfaithful) a.r.m
A R Mele, Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy
(Oxford, 1995)
self-deception. Everything about the concept of ‘self-deception’ is controversial among philosophers, begin-ning with its definition That human beings play a large and often wilful role in perpetuating their own ignorance and befuddlement is beyond dispute; but how legitimate
is the traditional characterization of the activities sub-sumed under this role as ‘self-deception’?
Dictionaries define the term unilluminatingly as the act
of deceiving oneself or the state of being deceived by one-self Since deception involves intentional misleading, such
a definition invites the question precisely how one can both intend to be misled by oneself and succeed in such an endeavour Can the *self perhaps be divided into a deceiv-ing and a deceived part, as in Freud’s view of the uncon-scious keeping information from the conuncon-scious self? Or
must one adopt Sartre’s paradoxical view, in Being and Nothingness, that ‘I must know, as deceiver, the truth that
is masked from me as deceived’?
Many reject such views as logically or psychologically impossible Some claim that ‘self-deception’ refers to one
or more of four restrictions on perception, none of which need involve the paradox of simultaneously deceiving and being deceived: first, the ignorance resulting from our necessarily limited capacity to respond to incoming inform-ation; second, the ‘psychic numbing’ that constitutes a reflex response to prolonged exposure to facts which would, if truly confronted each time, be difficult to bear—
as when children shield themselves from fully responding
self-deception 861
Trang 3to the violence they witness within the family or on
televi-sion; third, mechanisms of denial whereby we may end up
deceived about information that would otherwise be too
painful to confront, even though we are not consciously
deceiving ourselves; and, fourth, processes of more
con-scious avoidance such as procrastination, rationalization,
and compartmentalization
Advocates of political and religious doctrines have
fur-ther disputed the nature of what we hide from ourselves
The greater their zeal in promoting particular truths, the
more tempting it becomes for them to assume that
non-believers are not merely in error but actually engaged in
blocking truths they would otherwise have to
acknow-ledge as utterly self-evident In practice, this assumption
easily leads to indoctrination and worse, as witch-hunts
ancient and modern make clear
A final controversy about self-deception, however
defined, has to do with its desirability The injunction of
the Delphic Oracle—‘Know thyself ’—that underlies
much philosophy has long been pitted against dismal
sus-picions of what we would find if we took the Oracle
ser-iously The drive for attaining greater understanding
about ourselves and our role in the world has clashed with
the fear of inviting revulsion or misfortune by probing too
deeply Some have further claimed that judicious
self-deception is conducive to better mental and physical
well-being, as if to underline Jonathan Swift’s (ironical) remark,
in A Tale of a Tub, defining happiness as ‘the perpetual
Possession of being well Deceived’
The continuing debate over the desirability of
self-deception reveals two incompatible views of optimal
human functioning These views, in turn, generate
incom-patible conceptions of the role of all involved in therapy: to
what extent and by what means should they encourage
fuller self-understanding, or on the contrary promote in
patients what they take to be life-enhancing false beliefs? If
therapists choose the latter path, they run up, once more,
against one of the paradoxes of self-deception: for how can
they be honest with patients about their intent and about
any illusory belief they wish to encourage? But if they
can-not, why should their patients trust them? s.b
*lying
Sissela Bok, ‘Secrecy and Self-Deception’, in Secrets: On the Ethics
of Concealment and Revelation (New York, 1992).
Herbert Fingarette, Self-Deception (London, 1969).
Mike Martin (ed.), Self-Deception and Self-Understanding: New
Essays in Philosophy and Psychology (Lawrence, Kan., 1985).
Alfred R Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked (Princeton, NJ, 2001).
self-defeating theories.In the simplest sense, a theory is
self-defeating if the truth of the theory would imply the
falsity of the theory However, the expression is usually
applied to theories that purport to guide action in some
sense—particularly normative ethical theories A theory is
self-defeating if attempting to achieve what the theory
says ought to be achieved is bound to fail because of that
attempt The best-known example is sometimes referred
to as the paradox of hedonism Hedonism tells us that
hap-piness is the ultimate goal, but clearly if we spend our lives single-mindedly seeking happiness, we are unlikely to achieve it *Parfit introduces distinctions between individ-ually self-defeating theories (self-defeating when one per-son acts according to the theory) and collectively self-defeating theories (self-defeating when a group of people act according to the theory), and between indir-ectly self-defeating theories (self-defeating when the aims
of the theory are consciously adopted by the agent) and directly self-defeating theories (self-defeating when the aims of the theory are successfully achieved by the agent) Some forms of consequentialism seem to be indirectly self-defeating in the same way that hedonism is indirectly
D Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984).
self-determination, political The rule of a particular
group of people—nation or religious community or, more simply, the residents of a place— over their own affairs Self-determination is not the same as self-government, which usually implies some version of *democracy A group of people, freed, say, from imperial rule, might choose the government of a king, an oligarchy, or a clerical élite and, assuming that the choice is not coerced from out-side, this would still be called self-determination A right to self-determination is a right to make choices of that sort In recent times, this right is most often claimed on behalf of a nation (*Nationalism.) But the character and standing of the ‘self ’ in ‘self-determination’ is often a matter of dispute
In principle, the right was invented for the sake of existing collective selves, but it may also happen that collectivities are invented in order to exercise the right m.walz
*homeland, right to a
Alfred Cobban, The Nation State and National Self-Determination
(New York, 1970)
Dov Ronen, The Quest for Self-Determination (New Haven, Conn.,
1979)
self-interest:see egoism, psychological.
self-love:see Butler.
self-regarding and other-regarding actions A
distinc-tion among acdistinc-tions which becomes important if one attempts to formulate *liberalism by defining an area of conduct in which society has no business to interfere; as does J S Mill, when he says that ‘the only part of the con-duct of any one, for which he is amenable to society’ is that which concerns the interests of others Critics claim the
*liberty; state intervention; public and private
J S Mill, On Liberty.
Sellars, Roy Wood (1880–1973) American critical realist,
evolutionary naturalist, materialist, and socialist who taught at the University of Michigan Knowing, for Sellars,
is an activity which, in disclosing objects by means of
862 self-deception
Trang 4ideas, is about external things and consequently
tran-scends the cognitive organism ‘The sensory complex
arises in the brain under patterned stimulation of the sense
organs and has the role of guidance of response Such
guidance is a transcending role we do not need to get
mystical about transcendence.’ Evolutionary *naturalism
is not reductive, since nature undergoes cumulative
change in which new patterns emerge ‘Matter is
exist-ent in its own right And I shall think it in terms of the
cat-egory of substance’, not process For Sellars, *‘socialism is
a democratic movement whose purpose is in securing of
an economic organization of society which will give the
maximum possible at any one time of justice and liberty.’
His son, Wilfrid Sellars, acknowledged close philosophical
affinity with his father, though he wrote in the idiom of a
*Critical Realism; materialism
R W Sellars, Critical Realism (Chicago, 1916).
Symposium in Honor of Roy Wood Sellars (Philosophy and
Phenom-enological Research, 15; 1954).
Sellars, Wilfrid (1912–89) American philosopher notable
for his thoroughgoing investigations in metaphysics and
the philosophy of mind He distinguishes between the
manifest image of man as a being with beliefs, desires, and
intentions, and the scientific image of him as an embodied
being subject to study by physicists, biochemists, and
physiologists The task of reconciling those two images is
a major problem in the philosophy of mind Typical of
Sellars’s own approach to the problem is his verbal
behav-iourist account of thought and meaning in terms of the
functional role of linguistic items (*Functionalism.)
Thought is inner speech which is modelled on overt
speech, and overt speech is the exercise of a capacity to use
words and sentences appropriately in relation to the world
and to each other Thus nothing repugnant to the
*myth of the given
W Sellars, Essays in Philosophy and its History (Dordrecht, 1974).
—— Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, with intro by R Rorty
and study guide by R Brandom (Cambridge, Mass., 1997)
semantic ascent The move from talk about the world to
talk about the semantic properties of a language (e.g the
move from ‘Snow is white’ to ‘ “Snow is white” is true’)
This is said to involve ascent because of the doctrine that
the semantic properties of a language L cannot, in general,
be expressed in L itself, but only in a higher
*metalan-guage The move is useful because ascent to a semantic
level enables one to express certain kinds of
generaliza-tions that are otherwise inexpressible Thus, the sentence
‘Every axiom of Peano arithmetic is true’ makes, it is
argued, a claim about numbers But, since Peano
arith-metic contains infinitely many axioms, the claim cannot
be expressed, without resorting to semantic ascent, by any
W V Quine, Philosophy of Logic (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970).
semantics.In Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938) C W.
Morris divided the general study of signs (*semiotics) into three branches These are *syntactics, or the study of the relation of signs to other signs; semantics, or the study of the relation of signs to the things they represent; and
*pragmatics, or the study of the relation of signs to their users Semantics is thus the general study of the interpret-ation of *signs, and in particular the interpretinterpret-ation of the sentences and words of languages Following Carnap, it is commonly divided into pure semantics, or the study of artificial and formally specified languages in the abstract, and applied semantics, or the study of natural, empirically given languages such as English or French The language studied is called the *object language, and the language in which interpretations are given, the *metalanguage A semantic statement typically mentions a sentence or other term of the object language, and says what it means, or refers to, or what otherwise provides its interpretation using the metalanguage An object language can function
as its own metalanguage, at least to an extent circum-scribed by the need to avoid semantic *paradoxes A *for-mal semantics is a fully systematic description of the way
in which an object language is to be interpreted, standardly given by a recursive account of the way in which larger meanings or truth-conditions for entire and progressively more complex sentences depend upon the interpretations assigned to their elements
The fundamental problems for semantics are first to discover what linguistic categories we need to distinguish,
and then the kind of description of the function of terms
that is appropriate The great advances in the subject came with realizing, for instance, that ‘Some men are mortal’ is semantically quite different from ‘Aristotle is mortal’: the phrase ‘some men’ does not function as a name or ‘term’ interpreted as referring to some men The difference in function is clearly seen when we look at the different kinds
of inference such expressions create The theory of this dif-ference (quantification theory) is well understood, but other semantic problems have proved less tractable Are
we content to say of a *name, for example, that it refers to its bearer? In that case we see no difference between two names that have the same bearer Or is some more fine-grained description needed, separating what is said about each of two such names? The former option makes for a more simple and logically more tractable system (exten-sional semantics) while the latter initiates a search for prin-ciples governing the more fine-grained (intensional) features that separate terms with the same extension, but which mean different things Controversies in semantics frequently centre on the use of various devices, such as possible worlds, to provide the necessary interpretations But it is generally accepted that the more fine-grained the discriminations or contexts that a language permits, the richer are the categories and descriptions that a semantics must adopt in representing its structure
Even when these problems are solved, others remain for a full philosophical semantics For any semantics is apt
to deal in terms such as *reference, predication, and
semantics 863
Trang 5*truth, and perhaps in addition the richer intensional
con-cepts of *meaning, *sense, and *synonymy And even if
we are quite happy using such terms, the question
remains in virtue of what they apply (for instance, do
predi-cates mean what they do in virtue of shared universals,
and what are *universals and how do we apprehend
them?) If we consider a pure or formal specification of a
language as an abstract structure, then the equivalent
problem will be the question what is necessary for it to be
correctly attributed to a population Divisions rapidly
arise over whether the appropriate empirical grounding is
given by one kind of fact or another These problems
sep-arate semantics in a narrow sense from the wider concerns
of the philosophy of language s.w.b
*semiotics; language, problems of the philosophy of;
Montague
R Carnap, Introduction to Semantics (Cambridge, Mass., 1947).
P Ludlow (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Language
(Cam-bridge, Mass., 1997)
semantics, formal: see formal semantics.
semantic theory of truth This theory was developed by
Tarski, who was particularly concerned to overcome the
semantic *paradoxes to which talk of *truth gives rise in
natural languages, such as the *liar paradox He held that
truth could only be adequately defined for a language
which did not contain its own truth-predicate Calling
such a language, L, the object language, Tarski undertook
to provide a definition by *recursion of truth-in-L, the
def-inition being formulated in an appropriate
*metalan-guage For such a definition to be satisfactory, Tarski held,
it would have to enable one to prove all true equivalences
of the form ‘S is true-in-L if and only if p’, where ‘S’ is a
structural specification of a sentence of L and p constitutes
the correct translation of that sentence into the
metalan-guage He showed how this task could indeed be carried
out for certain artificial, formalized languages, but
believed that the method could not be extended to
pro-vide a definition of truth for any natural language, such as
*snow is white
S Haack, Philosophy of Logics (Cambridge, 1978).
semiotics.General theory of *signs Peirce distinguished
three kinds of sign: icons, which are like the objects
signi-fied (e.g naturalistic paintings); natural signs (e.g clouds
signify rain); and conventional signs (e.g red for danger,
and at least the majority of words) Semiotics is usually
divided into three fields: *semantics, the study of
mean-ing; *syntactics, the study of (surface ‘grammatical’ and
also ‘deep’) structure; and *pragmatics, which deals
with the extra-linguistic purposes and effects of
C W Morris, Signification and Significance (Cambridge, Mass.,
1968)
Sen, Amartya K (1933– ) Indian economist and
philoso-pher at Harvard, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics
in 1998 Working on the foundations of welfare and development economics, Sen is a leading theorist of social choice In the debate following *Arrow’s paradox, Sen has been a critic of *welfarism, which appraises the value of outcomes wholly in terms of individuals’ preferences between them Sen has argued for a consequentialist ethics that incorporates respect for rights in its doctrine of the good He raised the ‘paradox of the Paretian liberal’—
an inconsistency, given plausible background assump-tions, between the welfarist claim that if everyone prefers
an A to a B, then A must rank above B in a social ordering,
and a condition of minimal liberty that each agent possess
a personal sphere where her preferences dictate the social ordering Sen has worked on the nature of personal *well-being and the measurement of poverty t.p
A K Sen, Choice, Welfare and Measurement (Oxford, 1982).
—— On Economic Inequality, new edn (Oxford, 1997).
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (c.2bc–ad 65) Stoic, tutor to Nero, chief administrator of the Roman Empire with Bur-rusad 54–62, and author of ten Moral Discourses, 124 Moral Epistles, a satire on Claudius, nine tragedies, and a work on
natural philosophy At worst Seneca is an unoriginal
philosopher and a contrived stylist At best, in the Epistles and Discourses (note particularly ‘De providentia’, a Stoic
dissertation on suffering, and ‘Ad Marciam de consola-tione’, addressed to a mother on the death of her sons), he writes with a vividness of illustration and a persuasive bril-liance unrivalled in philosophy: philosophy is practical goodness; excessive passion is evil; external goods are ulti-mately valueless; life is infinitely worth while; tragedy can
be overcome or endured Driven to suicide by Nero, his reputation and his life alike were blighted by his infamous
*Stoicism
V Sørensen, Seneca: The Humanist at the Court of Nero (Edinburgh,
1984)
sensation.The subjective aspect of *perception—usually taken to denote the sensory (as opposed to conceptual) phase of a perceptual process In hearing a concert, for instance, the sensation is the conscious auditory event pre-ceding whatever thoughts and beliefs (if any) the sensa-tion arouses in the perceiver One might hear—thus have
a sensation caused by—a French horn without coming to know or believe that it is a French horn One might misidentify it as a trombone or not have any thoughts at all about it This, presumably, is what happens with ani-mals and young children They can hear French horns They can, therefore, have sensations—perhaps even sen-sations similar to ours—without these sensen-sations neces-sarily producing beliefs similar to ours Perhaps (though this is controversial and depends on just what is meant by having a *belief ) they can have sensations (be sentient) without having any beliefs at all
864 semantics
Trang 6Aside from the sensations (visual, auditory, olfactory,
and so on) associated with the various sense modalities,
there is also a wide variety of other sensory-like
phenom-ena that are ordinarily classified as sensations: twinges,
tickles, pains, itches, thirst, hunger, feelings of sexual
arousal, and so on If there is any feature that distinguishes
this odd assortment of mental entities, it is, perhaps, their
introspectively salient quality The sound of a French
horn is utterly unlike the look or feel of a French horn If
the sensation is identified, as it typically is in the case of
perceptual awareness, with the way things sound, look,
and feel, then these sensations, though they are all of the
same thing (a French horn), have an intrinsic, an
intro-spectively obvious, quality that distinguishes them from
one another This is quite unlike such *propositional
atti-tudes as thought, belief, judgement, and knowledge
Beliefs differ only with respect to their content—the
proposition believed—not in their intrinsic quality or
‘feel’ to the person having them Sensations, on the other
hand, can be of, about, or directed upon the same thing
(a French horn)—thus having, in this sense, the same
con-tent—and yet remain entirely different As a result,
thoughts are classified in terms of their *intentionality,
what they are of or about, while sensations are specified in
terms of their intrinsic character, what they feel or seem
like to the person having them, quite apart from what, if
anything, they are of or about
A second feature of sensations that sets them apart from
such discursive events as reasoning, thinking, knowing,
and remembering is that sensations are, in the first
instance at least, independent of the conceptual or
intel-lectual assets (if any) of the subject One cannot want
chocolate, believe that there are chocolates in the box, or
remember that one ate chocolate without understanding
what chocolate is One can, however, taste chocolate,
smell it, and see it—and in this sense have chocolate
sensations—while remaining completely ignorant of
what chocolate is In this way sensations constitute a
primi-tive level of mental existence They occur at a
level—pre-sumably in certain animals—at which discursive thought
and reason are, if possible at all, not well developed One
does not need the concept of an itch or a pain, the capacity
to have itch-thoughts and pain-beliefs, in order to feel
itches and pains
Though sensations, unlike thoughts, differ from one
another in some intrinsic way, their epistemological status
remains moot Is one directly aware of (say) a visual
sensa-tion when one perceives, in a perfectly normal way, an
external object? If so, is one aware of two things in normal
perception—the external object (we say we perceive) and
the internal sensation which it (the object) arouses in us?
Or is one directly aware of only one thing, the sensation,
while the external object is reached (known? perceived?)
by some inferential or constructive mental process (thus
being known or perceived indirectly) as the
*representa-tive theory maintains? Or is one only aware of the external
object, the internal sensation being known only by
inference, as *nạve realism asserts? If so, how is one’s
knowledge—which seems direct—of the character of
A Clark, A Theory of Sentience (Oxford, 2000).
F Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge,
Mass., 1981)
C Peacocke, Sense and Content (Oxford, 1983).
B Russell, The Analysis of Mind (London, 1921).
sense, manifold of: see manifold of sense.
sense and reference Standard translations of Frege’s
terms Sinn and Bedeutung, originating in his 1892 paper
‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’ The reference of an expres-sion is the entity it stands for: referring expresexpres-sions stand for objects, predicates stand for *functions (in the math-ematical sense, which Frege called ‘concepts’), and sen-tences stand for truth-values Referring expressions and predicates combine to form whole sentences, whose references are a function of the references of their parts Senses are ‘modes of presentation’ of *references: the terms ‘Cicero’ and ‘Tully’ have the same reference but dif-ferent senses Sense was initially introduced by Frege to solve the puzzle of identity: if ‘Cicero’ has the same refer-ence as ‘Tully’, then how can ‘Cicero is Tully’ be inform-ative when ‘Cicero is Cicero’ is not? The senses of the parts
of sentences combine to form the senses of sentences,
*connotation and denotation; meaning
Gottlob Frege, ‘On Sense and Meaning’, in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed P T Geach and Max
Black (Oxford, 1980)
sense awareness: see awareness, sense.
sense-data. Subjective entities (allegedly) having the properties the perceived external object (if there is one) appears to have In seeing a white circle under red light and at an oblique angle, the sense-datum would be red and elliptical (the way the white circle looks) According to sense-data theorists, one perceives an external object, a white circle, but what one senses (is acquainted with, directly apprehends) is a red ellipse: the subjective sense-datum Then, if one is clever (and knows about the funny lighting), one infers, on the basis of the sense-data one directly apprehends, that there is (probably) a white circle causing the red, elliptical sense-datum In this way our knowledge of sense-data is supposed to provide a founda-tion for all empirical knowledge f.d
*perception; phenomenalism; representative theory of perception
B Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (New York, 1959), ch 1.
C D Broad, Scientific Thought (London, 1923), chs 7 and 8.
sensibility.In one sense this can mean a set of individual or collective dispositions to emotions, attitudes, and feelings
As such, sensibility is relevant especially to value theory, including ethics, aesthetics, and politics Arguably, there are
at least three important interrelated types of judgement one
sensibility 865
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emo-tions can be criticized or justified against criticism in various
ways (e.g are ‘irrational’, ‘exaggerated’, ‘well-founded’,
etc.); that some constitutive emotions ought to be
regu-lated in certain ways, in light of criticism; and that individual
or collective responsibility is appropriate for some of the
emotions, in light of the possibility of regulation e.t.s
*aesthetic attitude; taste
Ronald B De Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge,
Mass., 1987)
sentences:see statements and sentences.
sentential calculus Where a *proposition is understood
to be a completely interpreted indicative sentence of a
lan-guage, ‘sentential calculus’ and *‘propositional calculus’
may be used interchangeably
Where, as in Frege, a proposition is an abstract entity
which is the sense or content of a sentence, those objects
are represented by sentences Different sentences in a given
or a different language may express the same proposition
Given the elusiveness of such entities, the logic of
inter-preted sentences remains the vehicle for presenting the
logic of propositions as in the propositional calculus
r.b.m
B Mates, Elementary Logic (Oxford, 1972).
sentential function An expression which can be joined to
another expression or expressions to form a sentence
Sen-tential functions include *connectives, such as ‘and’,
which form a complex sentence from a sentence or
sen-tences Predicates are also counted as sentential functions
since, for example, the predicate ‘ is wise’ when joined
with the singular term ‘Socrates’ forms the sentence
sentimentalism:see moral sense.
sentiments.A sentiment is an attitude, in favour of or
against people and their actions, which may involve both
*judgement and *emotion The term ‘sentiment’ has also
been used, as by Hume and Smith, to refer to a possible
basis for our moral attitudes In this use sentiment is a
feel-ing which the objects of moral appraisal evoke in us; as a
possible basis for our moral attitudes, sentiment is
A Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1759).
Serbian philosophy
1863–1945 Emerging after the foundation of Belgrade
University in 1863, Serbian philosophy gained a
reputa-tion through the work of Branislav Petronijevic´, whose
articles were later cited as authoritative in such works as
Lee’s Zeno of Elea (Cambridge, 1936) and Boyer’s The
Con-cepts of the Calculus (New York, 1939).
1940s–1960s The philosophical tradition was dismantled
in post-war Yugoslavia by the communist regime The
official establishment of ‘humanist Marxism’ followed the
1953 ideological cleansing of ‘dogmatists’ The critical atti-tude of members of the ‘Praxis Group’ such as Svetozar Stojanovic´ to the governing regime led to their dismissal from Belgrade University in 1975 The international reputation of ‘Praxis Marxism’ partly rests on non-philosophical grounds Non-Marxist approaches were not tolerated and Alexandar Kron’s work in formal logic represents the only such achievement of that time
1970s and since Although both politicians and Marxist
aca-demics became more tolerant in the early 1970s, it is hard
to understand how a critical mass of analytically orien-tated, practically self-taught non-Marxist students was reached so quickly The ‘September Meetings’ in Dubrovnik, established in the early 1980s by David Charles, Timothy Williamson, and their Belgrade col-leagues, resulted in what was later called the
‘England–Belgrade axis’ The distinctively analytic char-acter of Serbian philosophy is underlined in that fourteen
of the sixteen Yugoslav contributors to the collection cited below are, or have been, active at Belgrade University Hopefully, though now either spread throughout the world or still working at home under unfriendly condi-tions, some will make important contributions to meta-physics, logic, epistemology, philosophical psychology, ethics, philosophy of action, and philosophy of science Very well trained in philosophical analysis and symbolic logic, they are particularly successful in using thought
experiments and the *reductio ad absurdum method. m.a
*Croatian philosophy; Slovene philosophy
A Pavkovic´ (ed.), Contemporary Yugoslav Philosophy: The Analytic Approach (Dordrecht, 1988).
set theory The property of being human is said to ‘pick
out’ or ‘determine’ the set of all human beings This has subsets—the sets of Scots, English, etc.—and members—
e.g David Hume and Jane Austen At least normally, if not always, a set is not a member of itself: thus the set of City University philosophers is not itself, alas, another philoso-pher, who could help increasing numbers of students It is
an abstract object
Our basic logical thoughts often embody relations between sets, subsets, and members, for example in syllo-gistic argument Thus ‘All robots are musical’ says ‘The set
of robots is a subset of the set of musical things’; or, every member of the first set is a member of the second Between
1874 and 1897 Cantor developed an astonishingly rich the-ory of infinite sets, including ones whose members are ordered, and sets having even more members than the so-called ‘denumerably’ infinite set of all integers—thus prov-ing the existence of ‘higher’ infinities Later, Russell and Whitehead tried to show that pure mathematics is a branch of the logic of sets, and is thus *analytic Set theory has applications within many areas of mathematics
It is therefore extremely embarrassing that our simplest intuitive thoughts about sets very quickly lead to
contra-diction For if every property determines a set, then the set
866 sensibility
Trang 8(R) of all ‘normal’ sets, namely, ‘those which are not
mem-bers of themselves’ is, if a member of itself, then not, and
vice versa (*Russell’s paradox) Alternative set theories are
formal, symbolic expressions of relationships between
sets which attempt to avoid contradictions with minimal
loss of intuitive acceptability The Russellian approach
rejects as malformed symbolic expressions of both ‘S is a
member of itself ’ and its denial Sets are put in hierarchies,
and one can only meaningfully express membership
rela-tions between sets of immediately neighbouring levels
Such an axiomatization may be consistent, but only
through inordinate loss of expressive power Zermelo–
Fraenkel–Skolem set theory only allows the construction of
sets from properties when certain other conditions obtain:
these entail the non-existence of R Von Neumann–
Bernays– Gưdel set theory is more comprehensive but
even more complex It allows the existence of R, but it is
not a member of any other set (it is then called a ‘class’)
This seems counter-intuitive: for if R exists, then why
should there not be a merely two-membered set
contain-ing, say, R plus the set of all philosophers?. a.j.l
Abraham Fraenkel, ‘Set Theory’, in Paul Edwards (ed.), The
Ency-clopedia of Philosophy (New York, 1967).
Paul Halmos, Nạve Set Theory (Princeton, NJ, 1960).
Michael Potter, Set Theory and its Philosophy (Oxford, 2004).
sex.Biological feature distinguishing males and females in
respect of their reproductive roles (contrast *gender)
Thus, by extension, sex is thought of as a biological drive
which gives rise to activity that typically results in
repro-duction, or as that activity itself This suggests that the
kind of explanation required for such activity is a
bio-logical one, occasioning such protestations as ‘My sex life
is not my fault: I’m programmed by my genes’ As well as
presupposing a crude determinism, this underplays the
role of *culture in giving rise to multifarious forms of
sex-ual activity (e.g *homosexsex-uality) Yet sexsex-ual desire has
usually been viewed as a blind desire, i.e one the
desir-ability of whose object is not apparent to reason It is
perhaps for this reason that the character of Freudian
explanations of behaviour in terms of sexual desire (and
their scope) remains mysterious p.g
*sexual morality
Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire (London, 1986).
sex, philosophy of. The theoretical examination of
human sexuality, desire, and pleasure Analysis has
focused on the attempt to establish non-moral standards
to rank sexual behaviours as ‘natural’ or good, as opposed
to perverse or bad Central to this examination is
deter-mining whether sexual desire is localized simultaneously
within the phantasmatic as well as the sensory boundaries
of the skin Thomas Nagel reworks Sartre’s notion of ‘a
double reciprocal incarnation’ into an account of sexual
desire as a serial unfolding of nested desirings of two
reflective persons On this view, the category of perverted
sex would extend to include any solitary sexual practice
This analysis of sexual desire in terms of reciprocating psy-chic structurings has ramifications for justifications of sado-masochism Patrick Hopkins argues that rape simu-lations are logically distinct from rapes, since certain sex-ual behaviours cannot be properly individuated except by their links with a shared sexual imaginary Robert Solomon not only continues this mentalist reading of sex-ual desire, but refigures bodily gestures as having seman-tic content: an intimate behaviour is a ‘natural expression’ that can be perverse if untruthful or feigned Alan Gold-man, on the other hand, rejects any account of sexual desire that is not straightforwardly ‘bodily’ For Goldman, sexual desire is directed toward the physicality of another person and involves only a minimal, short-lived psycho-logical component On this account, the deliberate delay
of coitus and bestiality each count as perverse Other issues involve Kant’s claim that objectification is necessar-ily involved in any sexual relation between persons Martha Nussbaum separates ‘benign’ objectification from the malignant sorts marked by one or more of the follow-ing: viewing the desired other as essentially replaceable, lacking ‘boundary-integrity’, and failing to be the posses-sor and owner of a unique personal narrative
Michel Foucault challenges this entire analytic schema
by running a genealogy of sex On his view, sex for modern subjects in the West is discursive: subjectivities, bodies, and pleasures are produced by the operations of a particular regime of knowledge/power/pleasure
Fou-cault delineates ‘a scientia sexualis’ that naturalizes the
phe-nomena it extracts and organizes through medicalizing the confession, replacing the priest with the psycho-analyst He claims that any natural/unnatural schematic
is a mythic construction, since there is no non-linguistic access to any pre-social human nature b.t
*sex; sexual morality
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol i: An Introduction,
tr Robert Hurley (New York, 1978)
Alan Soble (ed.), The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings, 3rd
edn (Lanham, Md., 1997)
sexism. Thought or practice which may permeate lan-guage and which assumes women’s inferiority to men The existence of sexism is acknowledged from a variety of ideological perspectives, and sexism may be conceived either as something one encounters instances of, or as a pervasive phenomenon endemic to society Thus ‘sexist’ is applied pejoratively to individuals and to institutions both
by liberal feminists and by feminists who advocate a radical transformation of existing *gender relations j.horn
*feminism
Mary Vetterling-Braggin, Frederick A Elliston, and Jane English
(eds.), Feminism and Philosophy (Totowa, NJ, 1977).
Sextus Empiricus (ad c.200) Sceptic and physician Sextus,
about whose life we know practically nothing, wrote a number of works on the complex history of the Sceptical
movement The surviving works are: Outlines of Pyrrhonism;
Sextus Empiricus 867
Trang 9Against the Dogmatists; and Against the Professors The
second two are usually coupled together and titled Against
the Mathematicians, that is, all those who profess any sort of
technical knowledge Outlines of Pyrrhonism provides an
account of the philosophy of Pyrrho, including a
compari-son of *Pyrrhonism with versions of Academic
*scepti-cism The other works examine at considerable length
various dogmatic claims in the arts and sciences and
scepti-cal strategies that may be employed to undermine
confi-dence in them These works are therefore a mine of
information on many ancient philosophical schools
Sex-tus argues for the superiority of Pyrrho’s Scepticism to that
of the *Academy, although the difference between these
are disputed in the scholarship Although Sextus is
unre-lentingly critical of all other philosophical positions, he
believes that Scepticism has a positive practical purpose,
namely, the tranquillity of soul arising from abandoning
the quest for knowledge of any sort l.p.g
Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (eds.), The Modes of Scepticism
(Cambridge, 1985)
Jonathan Barnes, The Toils of Scepticism (Cambridge, 1990).
Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, ed and tr J Annas and
J Barnes, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2000)
Philip P Hallie (ed.), Sextus Empiricus (Indianapolis, 1985).
sexual morality.Principles of right conduct in matters of
*sex, or their observance Two questions arise: What
sex-ual acts are morally permissible? With whom are they
per-missible?
The view that some kinds of sexual act are morally
wrong can spring from several sources The most obvious
employs the *consequentialist test of whether they cause
harm Thus some sexually sadistic acts may, by this
criter-ion, be condemned, though de Sade himself would reply
that they cause less harm than the acts resulting from their
repression In the absence of reliable empirical evidence
on the effects of sexual behaviour (e.g of reading
pornog-raphy), non-consequentialist criteria may be turned to
One employs the notion that some kinds of sexual acts are
unnatural and therefore wrong Two problems arise
First, the mere fact that many sexual acts are not
con-ducive to reproduction (or to other biological purposes)
does nothing to show that they are unnatural, in the sense
of tending, or intended, to frustrate what, if anything, is
*natural to human beings Second, even if they were, they
would not thereby be shown to be immoral without
further premisses such as the Roman Catholic belief that
what is contrary to created nature’s purposes is wrong
because contrary to its Creator’s will
A more widely acceptable criterion condemns some
kinds of sexual acts as failing to treat those with whom
they are performed, or oneself, as *persons rather than as
objects Kant seems to have treated all sex like this,
hold-ing that ‘sexual love makes of the loved person an object of
appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the
per-son is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been
sucked dry’ Sartre thinks of ordinary sexual desire as
aiming to avoid this, but failing, so that either one makes
the other an object, as in sadism, or one becomes an object for the other, as in masochism With Sartre’s pessimism discarded, this has provided an influential criterion, par-ticularly for *feminism It does, however, require add-itional argument to conclude that depersonalized sex is morally impermissible
The view that a sexual partner should be treated as a person offers one in a series of answers to the question
with whom one may, morally, have sexual relations The
most stringent answer restricts sex to *marriage partners,
ruling out, inter alia, *homosexuality; the next to those in
a relationship of *love, ruling out casual sex; then to those desired and respected as persons, excluding, perhaps, prostitution; and uncontroversially, to consenting adults, ruling out sex with children and animals, who are incapable
of informed consent The first three answers correspond roughly to three general approaches in moral philosophy The ban on extramarital sex goes with an ethics of *duty The restriction of sex to love implies an ethics of *care And the person-centred approach emphasizes an ethics of
*virtue, of self-creation rather than spontaneity It may not
be fanciful to suggest that the application of each approach here is a reaction to viewing sex as a potentially disruptive force—disruptive, respectively, to society at large, so that exceptionless formal restrictions need to be imposed; to personal relationships, so that sex must be tied to concern for another’s welfare; and to the individuals themselves, whose integrity as persons is put at risk by it
Few philosophers have, by contrast, developed an ethics of sexuality as something other than an appetite requiring regulation They have, however, attacked the first two moral restrictions—on consequentialist grounds, like Plato, as socially dysfunctional; on the grounds that they inhibit individual *automony in relationships; and on feminist grounds that they impose a pattern of relation-ships which actually benefits men at the expense of women As to the third restriction, Nagel bravely main-tains that ‘bad sex is generally better than none at all’ Yet such *essentialist assumptions about sexuality run counter to currently popular views, deriving from femi-nism and *post-structuralism, which see different sexual-ities as constitutive of people’s identsexual-ities as e.g a lesbian woman or a straight man These identities, like those of any cultural minority, are regarded as prior to and formative of the particular moralities which apply to them Thus the attempt to formulate general principles of sexual conduct is viewed (as in a wider *ethical relativism) as the imposition
of the morality of one identity group—typically that of straight men—at the expense of members of others There are, however, many difficulties with this approach: how
fine-grained are the relevant sexual identities? Are all
iden-tities (e.g paedophile) to be tolerated, and, if not, why not?
Is the implied *libertarianism compatible with social organization? Can the objections to a general ethical rela-tivism be evaded? The absence of a middle way between universalizing and relativizing approaches to sexual moral-ity is sympathetic to contemporary practical, as well as philosophical, uncertainties in this area of life p.g
868 Sextus Empiricus
Trang 10R Baker and F Elliston (eds.), Philosophy of Sex (Buffalo, 1984).
T Nagel, ‘Sexual Perversion’, in Mortal Questions (Cambridge,
1979)
I Primoratz, Ethics and Sex (London, 1999).
A Soble (ed.), The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings,
3rd edn (Lanham, Md., 1997)
J Weeks, Invented Moralities (Cambridge, 1995).
Shaftesbury, third Earl of (1671–1713) Named Anthony
Ashley Cooper, like his descendant, the
nineteenth-century philanthropist, he is normally known simply as
Shaftesbury Partly educated under the politically radical
Locke (though he later criticized Locke on both ethics and
epistemology), he was an early, if not always consistent,
representative, in his Characteristics of Men, Manners,
Opin-ions, Times (1711), of the *‘moral sense’ doctrine in ethics,
inventing that phrase For much of the time, though not all
of it, he emphasized feeling rather than reason as the
source of morality: we approve of, or take pleasure in the
contemplation of, virtue, and this is because we are by
nature altruistic and not just selfish Morality with him
becomes human-orientated rather than God-orientated,
though religion can motivate us further towards it He also
foreshadowed to some extent *utilitarianism, which came
to prominence later in the eighteenth century a.r.l
S Grean, Shaftesbury’s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics (Athens,
Oh., 1967)
shame.An emotion that serves as the focal point of ethics
in many ancient and non-Western philosophies, but its
comparative neglect in many ethical theories is
illustra-tive The Judaeo-Christian tradition and many modern
theories place considerable emphasis on *guilt, but the
dif-ference between shame and guilt is profound and
symp-tomatic of a larger omission in ethics Guilt (not causal or
legal guilt, but the feeling of guilt) is a highly individualistic
emotion, a matter of self-scrutiny and self-condemnation
Shame, by contrast, is a highly social *emotion, and it has
to do with violating a common trust, ‘letting the others
down’ Like guilt, it is self-accusatory, but it is so through
the eyes of others, as an inextricable member of a group or
a community The capacity to feel shame has thus been
cited as a pre-condition of all the virtues, as in the
Ethiopian proverb ‘Where there is no shame, there is no
honour’ Thus Aristotle, in his Ethics, takes shame to be a
‘quasi-virtue’ It is not good to feel shame, because it is not
good to have done something about which to be ashamed,
but to do something wrong and not feel shame is the
ultimate proof of a wicked character r.c.sol
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Indianapolis, 1985).
Shoemaker, Sydney (1931– ) American philosopher at
Cornell, known principally for his work in metaphysics and
the philosophy of mind In the former he has argued for the
possibility of time without change He has defended a
causal theory of properties, which has as a consequence
that the laws of nature are a posteriori necessary rather
than contingent; and a causal theory of identity over time
In the philosophy of mind he is a vocal proponent of ana-lytic *functionalism, in defence of which he offers a subtle discussion of *qualia: he denies the possibility of absent qualia, that someone might be functionally identical to us, yet lack qualitative mental states; but accepts the possibility
of inverted qualia, that two people may be be functionally alike but differ in their qualitative mental states In add-ition, his work has covered personal identity, memory,
S Shoemaker, The First-Person Perspective and other Essays
(Cam-bridge, 1996)
—— Identity, Cause, and Mind: Philosophical Essays, expanded edn.
(Oxford, 2003)
side constraints: see ends and means.
Sidgwick, Henry (1838–1900) British moral philosopher,
who developed the most sensitive, sophisticated (and com-plicated) account of *utilitarianism in the nineteenth cen-tury Sidgwick was educated as a classical scholar at Cambridge, resigned his college position because of reli-gious doubts in 1869, but later became the first secular Pro-fessor of Philosophy at Cambridge (1883) He was the professor when McTaggart, Russell, and Moore were phil-osophy students Sidgwick wrote on many areas, but his
only great work is The Methods of Ethics (1874; and then five
other editions in his lifetime) This is not intended as a defence of utilitarianism so much as an account of the ways
in which it is possible to reach a rational basis for action Starting with common sense, Sidgwick identifies three such methods: *intuitionism, universal hedonism (i.e utili-tarianism), and individual *hedonism (i.e *egoism) He finds that the particular maxims of common-sense moral-ity do not meet the criteria he lays down for something being an intuitively self-evident principle; but that these are met by certain ‘absolute practical principles’ of a more abstract nature, such as that future good is as important as present good, or ‘that the good of any one individual is of
no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other’ With such principles he manages to reconcile intuitionism and utili-tarianism However, he thinks that egoism is also an intui-tive principle of action, which would only be made compatible with utilitarianism by the work of God Being reluctant to introduce God for this purpose, Sidgwick had
no solution for what he called the ‘dualism of *practical reason’, and hence ended the first edition with the sombre words that ‘the prolonged effort of the human intellect to frame a perfect ideal of rational conduct is seen to have been foredoomed to inevitable failure’ r.h
J B Schneewind, Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy
(Oxford, 1977)
Bart Schultz (ed.), Essays on Henry Sidgwick (Cambridge, 1992).
sign and symbol A distinction first explored in these
terms by C S Peirce Signs are a highly general category, including natural indications of things Spots are a sign of measles, clouds a sign of rain to come A sign of a state of
sign and symbol 869