The bulk of his subsequent work concentrated on moral philosophy, including an inci-sive critique of developments in that subject this century Contemporary Moral Philosophy London, 1967
Trang 1voluntarism, ethical Voluntarism can be characterized
as any philosophical view in which prominence is given to
the *will over against one’s other mental faculties Ethical
voluntarism is the view that whether an act qualifies as
right or wrong depends primarily upon how the act is
willed and that the consequences of one’s act are judged
good or bad primarily in accord with the goodness or
bad-ness of the will which produces the act In general, Kantian
ethics is quite hospitable to ethical voluntarism Ethical
voluntarists are inclined to doubt that there is such a thing
as moral luck, since fortuitous circumstances are
unre-lated to whether one’s will is good and hence to whether
one can be judged as having done right or wrong
g.f.m
D Statman, Moral Luck (New York, 1993).
von Hartmann, Eduard: see Hartmann, Eduard von.
von Neumann, John: see Neumann, John von.
von Wright, Georg Henrik (1916–2003) In 1939, G H
von Wright, a member of Finland’s Swedish-speaking
minority, went from Helsinki to Cambridge to pursue his
interest in induction and probability He met Ludwig
Wittgenstein, who influenced him greatly, and in 1948, at
the age of 33, von Wright succeeded Wittgenstein as
Pro-fessor of Philosophy at Cambridge University He
resigned the chair in 1951 to return to Finland From 1961
to 1986 he was Research Professor at the Academy of
Fin-land Besides editing many of Wittgenstein’s works, he
produced biographical, expository, and critical writings
about Wittgenstein A survey of the three volumes of his
Philosophical Papers indicates the scope of his interests:
Practical Reason (vol i, 1983) continues themes from The
Varieties of Goodness (1963), Norm and Action (1963), An
Essay in Deontic Logic (1968), and Explanation and
Under-standing (1971) Philosophical Logic (vol ii, 1983) continues
themes from A Treatise on Induction and Probability (1951)
and Logical Studies (1957) and includes essays on
para-doxes, preference, and tense logic Truth, Knowledge, and
Modality (vol iii, 1984) continues themes from Causality
and Determinism (1974) and Freedom and Determination
(1980) and includes essays on propositions, causal
P A Schilpp and L E Hahn (eds.), The Philosophy of Georg Henrik
von Wright, The Library of Living Philosophers, xix (La Salle,
Ill., 1989)
Vorstellung.German for ‘putting forward’, hence
‘repre-sentation’ or ‘idea’ as used by British Empiricists Like
‘idea’, Vorstellung has a narrow and a wide sense (1) It is a
mental *image, picture, or conception produced by prior
perception of an object or objects It contrasts with
‘sensa-tion’, ‘intui‘sensa-tion’, and ‘percep‘sensa-tion’, since these require the
actual presence of an object, and also with ‘thought’,
‘con-cept’, and ‘idea (Idee)’, since these need no pictorial
com-ponent and are more objective than Vorstellungen (One
speaks of my Vorstellung (*idea, conception) of God, but the
*concept (Begriff ) of God.) Vorstellungen are involved in
memory, imagination, etc., and are, in the view of older psychologists, subject to laws of ‘association’ (2) In a wide
sense, a Vorstellung is any mental item that refers to an
intentional object Hence a thought, a concept, or a
per-ception is also a Vorstellung.
Some idealists argued that we cannot know objects in
themselves, but only ‘the Vorstellungen that they produce
in us when they affect our senses’ (Kant), or that ‘the
world is my Vorstellung’ (Schopenhauer) Hegel’s *ideal-ism depends on thought, the ‘concept’, and the Idee, rather than Vorstellungen In his view, religion presents in Vorstel-lungen (in the narrow sense of ‘pictorial imagery’) the ‘con-tent’ that art presents in sensory intuitions (Anschauungen)
M Clark, Logic and System: A Study of the Transition from ‘Vorstel-lung’ to Thought in the Philosophy of Hegel (The Hague,
1971)
W A de Vries, Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity: An Introduction to Theoretical Spirit (Ithaca, NY, 1988).
C Knüfer, Grundzüge der Geschichte des Begriffs ‘Vorstellung’ von Wolff bis Kant (Halle, 1911).
voting paradox Suppose that three people, Alice, Brian, and Cait, are choosing between three candidates, Primus, Secunda, and Tertius, for a job Alice prefers Primus to Secunda to Tertius Brian prefers Secunda to Tertius to Primus Cait prefers Tertius to Primus to Secunda So a majority prefer Primus to Secunda, and a majority prefer Secunda to Tertius, and, paradoxically, a majority prefer Tertius to Primus So preferences obtained by majority voting between pairs do not give a coherent ranking Or,
to put it differently, the outcome depends on the order in which the options are presented If the first choice is between Primus and Secunda then Secunda will be elimin-ated and Primus will win when compared with Tertius But if the first choice is between Primus and Tertius then Primus will be eliminated and then Secundus will win when compared with Tertius These facts are special cases
of Arrow’s theorem, which shows that there can be no
*democracy; Arrow’s paradox
Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values, 2nd edn.
(1963)
Michael Dummett, Voting Procedures (Oxford, 1984).
Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich (1896–1934) Innovative Russian psychologist and philosopher who argued that only by understanding the role of culture in psychological development can we attain an account of consciousness that overcomes the shortcomings of *behaviourism and
*reductionism without embracing *dualism While human beings are endowed with elementary mental func-tions that can be explained naturalistically, the higher mental functions are mediated by psychological tools, such as language and other externalized systems of repre-sentation, which the individual acquires, not naturally, but through the internalization of social activity Each
950 voluntarism, ethical
Trang 2child therefore attains consciousness as she is inaugurated
into human culture Shortly after Vygotsky’s death from
tuberculosis in 1934, the Stalin regime blacklisted his
works for many years, but his ideas were preserved by his
collaborators, especially A R Luria and A N Leontiev,
and formed the foundation of Soviet ‘socio-historical
psychology’ His thought has also been influentual in the West, particularly among educationalists d.bak
David Bakhurst, Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy
(Cambridge, 1991), ch 3
L S Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Cambridge, Mass.,
1986)
Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich 951
Trang 3Walton, Kendall(1939– ) American philosopher
Wal-ton’s work in philosophical aesthetics makes him one of
the most influential thinkers in that field since Monroe
Beardsley and Nelson Goodman One of Walton’s early
contributions (1970) was to show that the aesthetic
properties of works of art were not intrinsic to them, but
were instead relative to the medium, style, and genre
cat-egories in which those works were correctly perceived,
and thus that, as a consequence, strong versions of
formalism and anti-intentionalism regarding works of art
must be mistaken Walton’s major contribution to
aes-thetics, however (1990), consists in his elaboration of a
general theory of representations or fictions, which are
treated as equivalent, in terms of an activity of
prop-guided imagination, or ‘make-believe’ In subsequent
important papers Walton has addressed issues concerning
the aesthetics of photography, the aesthetics of music, the
embedding of moral perspectives in literature, and the
role of simulation in aesthetic appreciation j.lev
Kendall Walton, ‘Categories of Art’, Philosophical Review (1970).
—— Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
Walzer, Michael (1935– ) American political philosopher
who has specialized in the study of democracy, justice,
and ethical relativism He is particularly interested in the
processes through which each community arrives at its
own shared understanding of justice and the good society
Walzer believes that these processes and understandings
are necessarily community-specific, and hence a certain
degree of cultural relativism must be respected However,
Walzer also recognizes a non-relativist ‘minimal code’,
prohibiting slavery, genocide, and gross cruelty in any
community His most important works include Just and
Unjust Wars (1977), Spheres of Justice (1983), and
Interpret-ation and Social Criticism (1987) Walzer has been variously
described as a liberal, a communitarian, and a radical
democrat, but the originality of his thought makes him
difficult to label Walzer is currently a professor at the
Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton w.k
Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and
Equal-ity (Oxford, 1983).
Wang, Hao (1921–95) American mathematical logician
and philosopher of mathematics, born and educated in
China He supplied the axioms of membership for Quine’s
*set theory in Mathematical Logic, replacing an earlier
inconsistent version He extended Russell’s ramified type hierarchy to infinite levels He was the first to write (in 1959) a computer program which efficiently proved all the
first-order theorems of Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica His contributions to mathematical
philoso-phy often took the form of historical analyses of major fig-ures; his reports of his discussions with Gödel in the 1970s are a main source for Gödel’s unpublished philosophical views on truth and the nature of mathematics Wang argued that philosophers of mathematics should take mathematical knowledge and intuition as given, and seek
to describe their structure and their place in life w.a.h
Hao Wang, Beyond Analytic Philosophy: Doing Justice to what we Know (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).
—— A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy (Cambridge,
Mass., 1996)
Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529) Confucian thinker in China, also known as Wang Shou-jen His thinking partly drew inspiration from that of Lu Hsiang-shan (1139–93), and scholars speak of a Lu–Wang school which competed for influence with the Ch’eng–Chu school of Ch’eng I (1033–1107) and Chu Hsi (1130–1200) Wang’s
fundamen-tal ideas are contained in the work Ch’uan-hsi-lu (Instruc-tions for Practical Living) Though sharing Chu Hsi’s view
that human beings already have a fully virtuous dispos-ition which has been obscured by distortive desires and thoughts, he opposed Chu on various issues For example, for Wang, self-cultivation should involve one’s directing attention to the mind, constantly watching out for and eliminating distortive desires and thoughts, rather than engaging in such inquiries as the study of classics and
*Confucianism
Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings by Wang Yang-ming, tr Wing-tsit Chan (New York, 1963).
war, just The tradition of ‘just war’ theory has aimed at identifying those conditions which make it morally legit-imate to wage war It was developed originally by the Christian Church, and more recently has been expressed
in the conventions of international law The early W
Trang 4Christian attitude of abstention from involvement in war
was difficult to sustain when Christianity became the
established religion of the Roman Empire, and thinkers
such as Augustine turned to the idea that the waging of
war was a legitimate exercise of the authority of rulers As
the ruler may justly punish wrongdoing on the part of his
subjects, so likewise war could be ‘just’ if it was waged to
punish external wrongdoers
Over the centuries this position was elaborated in
detail, and divided into the theory of jus ad bellum—what
makes it right to go to war—and the theory of jus in bello—
what it is right to do in war Typical conditions laid down
for jus ad bellum were that war may be undertaken only by
a legitimate authority, it may be waged only for a just
cause, it must be a last resort, there must be a formal
dec-laration of war, and there must be a reasonable hope of
success The two most important conditions for jus in bello
were that the means employed should be ‘proportional’ to
the end aimed at (that is, the war should not be fought in
such a way as to constitute a greater evil than the evil it
was intended to remedy), and that it was not permissible
to kill ‘the innocent’ (understood to mean
non-combatants, civilians)
More recent versions of ‘just war’ theory have focused
especially on two ideas: (i) that war can be justified only as
a response to aggression (this is presented as the principal
condition for jus ad bellum); and (ii) the idea of
non-combatant immunity as the principal condition for jus in
bello The difficulty with both ideas is their dependence on an
analogy between individuals and communities The right
to resist aggression is standardly compared to individuals’
right of self-defence However, even if it is permissible for
an individual to kill his attacker in order to defend his own
life, is it equally justifiable to kill thousands of people in
order to defend the borders of a nation? It can be argued
that individuals have a right of self-defence because the
attacker has forfeited his own right to life by threatening
someone else’s life It does not follow, however, that the
inhabitants of a country, or even its military personnel,
have forfeited their right to life because their country’s
rulers have decided upon aggression against another
country
The application of the principle of non-combatant
immunity raises similar problems Even if a nation
waging war is not ‘innocent’, most of the individual
com-batants would seem to be, in any morally relevant sense,
just as ‘innocent’ as non-combatants They are not
responsible for the war They may have been compelled
to fight, and if civilians are in an appropriate sense
‘inno-cent’, then most individual combatants would seem to be
no less so Moreover, the nature of modern societies
and the immensely destructive power of modern
weapons makes it very difficult in practice to discriminate
between combatants and non-combatants In most
mod-ern wars it is virtually impossible to target a country’s
mili-tary forces and milimili-tary installations without attacking
centres of population and killing large numbers of
civilians In that case no modern war can be waged
with-out killing the innocent Perhaps we should conclude that
*international relations, philosophy of; violence, political
Robert L Holmes, On War and Morality (Princeton, NJ, 1989) David Rodin, War and Self-Defence (Oxford, 2003).
Jenny Teichman, Pacifism and the Just War (Oxford, 1986) Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (Harmondsworth, 1977).
war and philosophy Philosophers of every era have tried
to understand the nature and problems of war—from Heraclitus’ conception of war as the father of all things to Kant’s treatise on eternal peace Philosophers have debated the value of war as a school for virtue, the misery
of war, the causes of war, the *just war, and the possibility
of creating peace and universal brotherhood But war has been important to philosophy in other ways too The dis-astrous Peloponnesian War certainly influenced Plato’s bad opinion of Athenian democracy The capture of
Rome by Alaric made St Augustine write Civitas Dei.
Montaigne’s scepticism was strengthened by the religious wars of the sixteenth century The Civil War of seven-teenth-century England gave Hobbes the problematic of
Leviathan.
In modern times too, war has influenced philosophy, sometimes in unexpected ways Some illustrations of this can be drawn from the First World War In quite a new way the First World War made scholars and scientists par-ticipate in the war of propaganda The role of the philoso-phers was important They contributed grand metaphysical interpretations of the war aims of their own nations In Germany philosophers like Paul Natorp, Max Scheler, and George Simmel, to name a few, did their bit for the Vaterland The war was depicted as a struggle between profound German ‘culture’ and shallow Anglo-French ‘civilization’ The value of war as existential experi-ence was stressed All the German philosophical heritage was mobilized for the fight ‘Send Fichte to the trenches!’ became a catchword The French philosophers were not
to be outdone In his La Signification de la guerre (1915; tr.
into English the same year) Henri Bergson explained that the war was one between ‘life and matter’ It takes no deep knowledge of the philosophy of Bergson to guess which among the combatants in the war represented ‘life’ and which represented ‘matter’ Those French historians of philosophy who had taken Fichte or Hegel as their subject had an unpleasant choice before them Should they sacri-fice thinkers, whom formerly they had venerated, on the altar of patriotism? Or should they try to make a distinc-tion between the old good Germany and the new bad one? Nor did the philosophical struggle in Great Britain escape the bitterness of war Until its outbreak *Hegelian-ism had been firmly entrenched in the universities of Eng-land and ScotEng-land Now everything emanating from the enemy was seen as highly suspect One victim of this wave
of hatred against all things German was the philosopher-statesman R B Haldane Haldane was a Hegelian philoso-pher and a follower of T H Green He was also a liberal
war and philosophy 953
Trang 5politician When the war broke out Haldane was Lord
Chancellor in Asquith’s Cabinet In 1916 he was forced to
resign A hue and cry had been raised against this
states-man who had once said that Gerstates-many was his ‘spiritual
home’ Wartime animosity against German philosophy is
exemplified in another way by L T Hobhouse in his
The Metaphysical Theory of the State (1918) The book is a
critique of Bernard Bosanquet’s Hegelian political
philos-ophy In his preface Hobhouse dedicated it to his son, who
was fighting in the trenches against the very enemy whom
his father tried to overcome with philosophical
argu-ments—the German spirit
Of course there were other, more subtle ways in which
the war influenced philosophy One of the most
import-ant works of twentieth-century philosophy, Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was
pre-pared and written while its author was an active
combat-ant or a prisoner of war Does not the agonized tone of this
strange and remarkable work bear some relation to that
biographical background?
The First World War had the effect of making
philoso-phy more national and the differences between national
traditions in philosophy more important The Second
World War and the ensuing Cold War had similar
conse-quences, national and ideological cleavages parting
philosophers and other scholars from each other
Philo-sophical arguments had their share in the wars of
propa-ganda World congresses of philosophy were held and
other efforts made to bring philosophers together in
amic-able discussions But there was great difficulty in finding a
way back even to the climate of discussion of the
nineteenth century The Stoic utopia of a peaceful world
state of philosophers seems very distant s.n
Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the
Modern Age (Boston, Mass., 1989).
Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).
Warnock, Geoffrey J (1923–96) Warnock’s first major
publication was a monograph on Berkeley (Berkeley
(Har-mondsworth, 1953) ) in which he brought some of the tools
of modern ‘linguistic philosophy’ to bear on Berkeley’s
ideas, to considerable effect The bulk of his subsequent
work concentrated on moral philosophy, including an
inci-sive critique of developments in that subject this century
(Contemporary Moral Philosophy (London, 1967) ), and an
exposition of his own developed theory (The Object of
Moral-ity (London, 1971) ) Warnock takes a broadly naturalistic
approach to the phenomenon of morality, arguing that it
exists to help regulate conflict and promote social stability
He was the husband of Mary Warnock, and spent his
work-ing life in Oxford, where he was Vice-Chancellor from 1981
to 1985 He was knighted in 1986 n.j.h.d
*Berkeley
Warnock, Mary (1924– ) Baroness Warnock has done
notable work in at least four fields: academic philosophy
(narrowly conceived); the theory and practice of
educa-tion; the morality and legality of new methods of embryo fertilization; public service associated with these concerns
In academic philosophy, she has written extensively on ethics, and particularly existentialist ethics Other work has been in the philosophy of mind, with monographs entitled
Imagination (London, 1976) and Memory (London, 1987).
She chaired a government inquiry into special educational needs, in the mid-1970s, and has written widely on educa-tional issues, at both school and university level She add-itionally chaired the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation in the early 1980s Much of her working life was spent in Oxford, as college tutor but also Headmistress
of Oxford High School She was Mistress of Girton Col-lege, Cambridge, 1985–91 She was created a life peer in
1985 and was married to Geoffrey Warnock n.j.h.d
*bioethics; moral sense
M Warnock, Making Babies: Is There a Right to Have Children?
(Oxford, 2003)
war of all against all: see state of nature.
Watson, John Broadus (1878–1958) An American psy-chologist, Watson was the father of *behaviourism, the dominant theory of psychology through most of the early and middle decades of the twentieth century For Watson,
if psychology is to be scientific, its data must consist of external (public) stimuli and external (behavioural) responses; and not introspective (private mental) reports Introspective reports give psychologists only indirect access to whatever data they need to develop their sci-ence In contrast, behavioural reports give psychologists access to data that are as direct as those found in the phys-ical sciences As a method for how the science of psych-ology should proceed, Watson’s (as well as Clark Hull’s and B F Skinner’s) behaviourism should be distinguished from logical or conceptual behaviourism, which argues that the meaning of mental terms is wholly or primarily analysable behaviourally and/or dispositionally n.f
John Broadus Watson, Behaviourism (London, 1925).
Watsuji Tetsuro¯(1889–1960) A prominent philosopher associated with the Kyoto School, Watsuji proposed
the East Asian idea of
ningen—‘human-beings-in-relationship’—as the basis for a philosophical anthropology Torn in his youth between attractions to philosophy and literature, Watsuji produced early works on Schopen-hauer, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, before turning to a study of Asian traditions of thought A polymath like many of his colleagues, he continued to write on such top-ics as Homer, Greek polittop-ics, and early Christianity, but devoted most of his energies to writings on Buddhism and the cultural history of Japan, with special emphasis on eth-ical thought In his works on cultural anthropology—of
which Climate (1935) has been translated into English—
Watsuji criticized Heidegger for neglecting human
spa-tiality in Being and Time and for making his notion of
954 war and philosophy
Trang 6*Japanese philosophy.
Watsuji Tetsuro¯, Climate: A Philosophical Study, tr Geoffrey
Bownas (Tokyo, 1961)
weakness of will: see akrasia.
Weber, Karl Emil Maximilian (Max) (1864–1920) German
sociologist, whose polymathy defied his characterization
of our age as one of specialization and bureaucracy Men
attach meanings to their actions and these become
embod-ied in social norms Hence sociology involves
‘understand-ing’ (Verstehen) But it can causally explain social
phenomena by the comparative method and by ‘ideal
types’ Ideal types include the three types of authority:
trad-itional, charismatic, and legal-rational or bureaucratic
(which prevails in both *capitalism and *socialism) Social
phenomena, e.g the rise of capitalism, depend not only on
economic factors but on ideas, e.g Calvinism’s ‘Protestant
ethic’ Status groups are as important as Marx’s economic
classes In response to the political upheavals of 1919 he
dis-tinguished the ‘ethic of responsibility’ from the ‘ethic of
conscience’ and quoted Goethe’s Faust: ‘The devil is old;
you must become old to understand him’ m.j.i
R Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (London, 1960).
Weil, Simone (1909–43) A pupil of the radical
individual-ist philosopher Alain, Simone Weil evolved a Platonic
interpretation of the world with strong mystical leanings
Her ideals, which first lay in the direction of
anarcho-syndicalism, she pursued with a consistent eccentricity
After her conversion to Christianity, she combined her
strong commitment to many of its Catholic forms with a
thoroughgoing interpretation of its main themes—God,
creation, redemption—through the concepts of ancient
Greek philosophy This involved an emphasis on the
impersonal and the contemplative Always a political
activist, she also attempted to sketch the politics of a
soci-ety equal to these aspirations As such she represents the
most striking example of twentieth-century Christian
D McLellan, Simone Weil: Utopian Pessimist (London, 1990).
welfarism.A view which assigns to the state the function
of looking after the well-being or welfare of the people
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
liberal-democratic theorists (such as Adam Smith) held that the
state had a largely negative function of protecting security
from outside or inside and only a minimal welfare
func-tion, such as the provision of large works which individuals
could not manage on their own or the ensuring of
min-imum standards of education Welfarism became a large
function of the state in Britain after the Beveridge Report
(1942), which propounded state responsibility for
individ-ual welfare ‘from the cradle to the grave’ Other European
states adopted the idea of welfarism to a greater or lesser
extent Indeed, Germany pioneered both modern social
insurance in the 1880s and the concept of Wohfahrstaat in
the 1920s The USA has been much less influenced by these
ideas At the moment there seems to be a move away from welfarism in the UK and other parts of Europe, partly on the grounds that it is difficult to sustain the expenditure involved in such welfare concerns as the National Health Service, and partly on broader moral grounds, that wel-farism saps the moral fibre of the people and is really mas-sive state paternalism or, as it is often described by its opponents, that it constitutes the ‘nanny state’ r.s.d
*conservatism
R Hattersley, Choose Freedom: The Future for Democratic Socialism
(Harmondsworth, 1987)
R Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford, 1974).
well-being. Variously interpreted as ‘living and faring well’ or ‘flourishing’, the notion of well-being is intricately bound up with our ideas about what constitutes human
*happiness and the sort of life it is good to lead Well-being
is said to be both a condition of the good life and what the
good life achieves
However, the phrase ‘the good life’ is ambiguous between the morally good life and the sort of life most people aspire to, a life in which comfort and enjoyment have a large part Indeed we may even suspect that the two sorts of life are mutually exclusive—and that well-being belongs firmly in the latter, or would be a surprising
central feature of the former It seems that the ambiguity
can at least be taken as an indication of how unclear we find the connection between being morally good and pos-sessing health, wealth, and happiness, and the other com-ponents of well-being
Some philosophers have, nevertheless, objected to the suggested dichotomy between what is morally good and what is enjoyable Aristotle, for example, insists in his
dis-cussion of *eudaemonia that the morally good life is
essen-tial to human flourishing and, conversely, that being good
is possible only for a person who has well-being Thus, according to this view, well-being is a notion which spans both the moral and non-moral aspects of life It follows
that any adequate conception of a good life cannot be
limited to either a narrowly moral, or a non-moral, account It will be a highly complex account, akin to the answer a parent might give when asked ‘What sort of life
do you wish for your children?’, with all the intricacies such an answer would involve
Furthermore, because a good person cannot enjoy well-being in conditions of poverty or oppression, it is clear that well-being is also a political notion It must therefore be explicated in both moral and political terms, with the focus of interest placed firmly on the interdepend-ence of these While common sense accords with this view of the matter, the notion of well-being has tended to
be the subject of much dispute, and prey to the conflicting conceptions of what enables human beings to flourish which are provided by different moral and political philosophies
Nevertheless, it seems possible to specify, as Rawls and Honderich do, the primary goods which are necessary, if
well-being 955
Trang 7not sufficient, conditions of well-being, and the political
arrangements which will therefore facilitate it The
ques-tion of the distribuques-tion of well-being will then be
essen-tially a matter of social justice Since it is hard to justify
inequalities of well-being even when it seems possible to
justify inequalities of socio-economic goods, the question
will be best answered, perhaps, by some principle of
equality which gives priority to policies whose end is to
make well-off those who are badly off in terms of
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.
J Griffin, Well-Being (Oxford, 1986).
T Honderich, ‘The Question of Well-Being and the Principle of
Equality’, Mind (1981).
J Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971).
W Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford, 1996).
well-formed formula A formal calculus has a basic
vocabulary and rules for forming acceptable sequences
(well-formed formulae or wffs) of that vocabulary
Well-formed formulae are analogues of grammatical sentences
in natural language The rules for well-formedness are
analogues of rules of grammar For example, for a version
of the *propositional calculus where
(1) ~ and ∨are basic logical constants (‘not’, ‘or’),
(2) A1, A2, , A n, are atomic propositional expressions,
the set of wffs is defined as follows:
(3) wffs are either atomic propositional expressions or
molecular, i.e of the form ~ φ or (φ∨ψ), where
(4) ~φ is a wff if and only if φ is a wff,
(5) (φ∨ψ) is a wff if and only if φ and ψ are wffs (‘(’and
‘)’ are analogues of punctuation.)
(1)–(5) provide a *decision procedure for
B Mates, Elementary Logic (Oxford, 1972).
Weltanschauung. German for ‘world-view’, a general
view of the universe and man’s place in it which affects
one’s conduct For Dilthey philosophies are world-views,
and fall into three types: *materialism, pantheistic
*vital-ism, *idealism Husserl contrasted culturally and
histor-ically relative world-views with ‘scientific’ philosophy
Scheler argued that we cannot avoid a world-view; but we
should choose it reflectively and by a valid method
Jaspers investigated the roots of world-views in our
M Heidegger, ‘Anmerkungen zu Karl Jaspers Psychologie der
Weltanschauungen’, in Wegmarken, 2nd edn (Frankfurt, 1978).
E Husserl, Philosophy as a Rigorous Science (1910–11), in
Phenom-enology and the Crisis of Science, tr Q Lauer (New York,
1965)
Weyl’s paradox is a name that has been used for the
para-dox concerning the term ‘heterological’, which is
sup-posed to apply to all and only terms which do not apply
truly to themselves The problem is that it then seems that
‘heterological’ is heterological if and only if it is not This
paradox was originally presented in 1908 in a paper by Kurt Grelling and Leonard Nelson, so that the term
‘Weyl’s paradox’ is incorrect Herman Weyl (1885–1955) was a German-American mathematician, physicist, and
*Grelling’s paradox
wff:see well-formed formula.
Whewell, William (1794–1866) Influential Cambridge philosopher, mineralogist, and educational reformer Son
of a Lancaster carpenter, Whewell became Master of
Trin-ity College in 1841 In his The Philosophy of the Inductive Sci-ences Founded upon their History (London, 1840) he sought
to update the methodology advocated programmatically
in Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, and to base this
updat-ing on consideration of how science had actually pro-gressed—a consideration made possible by his own
History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Time (London, 1837) He asserted a fundamental
antith-esis between the facts studied by a scientist and the con-cepts that a scientist invents in order to colligate the facts, and owed to Kant the idea that certain very general laws are presuppositions of empirical inquiry Correspond-ingly he opposed J S Mill’s views about the epistemology
*natural law
M Fisch, William Whewell: Philosopher of Science (Oxford, 1991).
Whitehead, Alfred North (1861–1947) British math-ematician and philosopher who spent his later and philo-sophically most productive years in the United States at Harvard University, where he and his wife hosted
legen-dary Sunday teas Principia Mathematica (1910–13), his
three-volume attempt in collaboration with his former student Bertrand Russell to show that mathematics can be reduced to logic (i.e to establish *logicism), is considered
by many to be one of the great intellectual achievements
of all time Process and Reality (1929), a metaphysical
sys-tem in which substance (as traditionally conceived in Western philosophy) is rejected in favour of process, is regarded as having importance in the history of meta-physics comparable to the significance of his earlier work for logic and the foundations of mathematics
Whitehead’s work is usually divided into three periods: before 1914, mathematics and logic; 1914–24, philosophy
of physical science; and 1924–47, metaphysics and the his-torical role of metaphysical ideas in civilization Although during most of his life he considered himself and was con-sidered by others to be a mathematician, study of his intel-lectual development reveals it to be unified by philosophical concerns (e.g ‘modes of togetherness’)
In Science and the Modern World (1925), his first
meta-physical work, Whitehead rejected the idea of ‘simple location’ presupposed by scientific materialism Every-thing, he said, is a field spread out temporally and spatially; every object, from a human body to an electron, is
956 well-being
Trang 8will 957
composed of events or processes In Process and Reality he
systematically elaborated this metaphysics, in which the
basic unit is an experiential event called an ‘actual entity’
An actual entity is a unifying of its relations to the other
actual entities of the world it appropriates These
appro-priating relations are ‘prehensions’, vectors which
trans-form everything experienced into that entity’s distinctive
actuality
God plays a central role in this appropriating process In
his ‘Primordial Nature’ God orders possibilities (‘eternal
objects’) to make them relevant to the becoming of an
entity In his ‘Consequent Nature’ God preserves the
immediacies of all past actual entities and unites them
with his envisionment of the primordial unity of all eternal
objects God is not only necessary to every becoming:
becomings are necessary to the development of God as
Consequent Like any actual entity, God is a process of
becoming
Whitehead’s books after Process and Reality avoid
technicalities in exploring imaginatively the significance
of his metaphysical ideas Religion in the Making (1926) is a
richly suggestive discussion of the nature of religion;
Adventures of Ideas (1933) presents, for example, his
con-ception of experience in luminous prose; and Modes of
Thought (1938) is intended as ‘a free examination of some
ultimate notions, as they occur naturally in daily life’
p.h.h
*process philosophy
George A Lucas, ‘Outside the Camp: Recent Work on
White-head’s Philosophy’, Transactions of the C S Peirce Society
(1985)
Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead
(New York, 1941)
why.The question ‘Why ?’ is answered by explaining
why, which is stating a reason why (explaining-what is
dif-ferent) Often such reasons are causes, but even when
‘cause’ is not the natural description, ‘Because – – –’ is the
natural formula for answering ‘why’ questions Other
idioms do exist, as in: ‘Why did she flood the
bath-room?’—‘Out of mischief ’; ‘Why do animals have
hearts?’—‘For pumping the blood’; ‘Why walk?’—‘To
save money’ But such answers can always be expanded
into ‘Because – – –’ answers, usually becoming more
informative in the process (the expansion will often
indicate that the thing to be explained does some good,
or—differently—aims at some good, these being two
kinds of *teleological explanation)
A ‘why’ explanation must, first, state a reason for
think-ing that the matter to be explained is true: for example,
‘Bangkok is hot because it is in the tropics’ This may,
sec-ondly, need amplification—different things go without
saying in different contexts of ‘why’ inquiry The
amplifi-cation may fill the reason out, for example by adding that
most tropical cities are hot, or strengthen it, for example
by substituting ‘Because it is at sea-level in the tropics, and
all sea-level tropical cities are hot’, or extend it, for example
by explaining why sea-level tropical cities are hot (this last
process is potentially endless) But thirdly, some ‘why’ questions do not need, or even cannot get, answers—for example, ‘Why is Bangkok a sea-level tropical city?’ Finally and crucially, many reasons for thinking fail to be
reasons why even after these amplifications For example—
an example of Aristotle’s—‘Because they do not twinkle’ does not begin to explain why the planets are near us (here the explanation goes the other way round) The question what extra is required connects with the mysterious
*explanation; reasons and causes
P T Geach, Reason and Argument (Oxford, 1976), ch 17 D.-H Ruben, Explaining Explanation (London, 1990).
Why be moral? see moral philosophy, history of.
Wiggins, David (1933– ) Oxford philosopher specializing
in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and ethics, noted for his work on *identity He challenges P T Geach’s doc-trine of the relativity of identity, advancing instead an
‘absolute’ conception whereby if particulars are identical under one *sortal concept, then they are identical under any other that applies to them Geach’s supposed counter-examples are dismissed as turning on equivocation Thus
Geach suggests that x and y might be the same river, but different bodies of water Wiggins’s response is that rivers are not identical with bodies of water, but rather consti-tuted by them.
One consequence of Wiggins’s position is that two dif-ferent *things—for instance, a river and the body of water currently constituting it—may exist in the same place at the same time This may seem odd, but is unobjectionable provided, as here, the things in question are of different
D Wiggins, Needs, Values, Truth, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1998).
—— Sameness and Substance Renewed (Cambridge, 2003).
will.Traditionally the will was taken to be a mental fac-ulty responsible for acts of volition such as choosing, deciding, and initiating motion This faculty of the soul or mind was taken as one of the characteristics, the most important, separating us from animals and inanimate objects Usually the will was explicitly taken to be capable
of *origination—the creation of a new beginning and escape from the past Kant stressed the moral importance
of acts of will, as opposed to practical consequences of actions, but the will reached its philosophical apotheosis
in Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea (1818, 1844).
Contemporary philosophy of mind is less accepting of ontologically real mental faculties, although the will has continued to have attention paid to it The traditional problem of the freedom of the will concerns itself partly
with (a) the possible incompatibility between free will and determinism, and (b) the alleged dependency of moral
*freedom and determinism
A Kenny, Will, Freedom, and Power (Oxford, 1975).
Trang 9Brian O’Shaughnessy, The Will (Cambridge, 1980).
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, 1949).
William of Ockham: see Ockham.
Williams, Bernard A O.(1929–2003) Bernard Williams
was one of the leading British intellectuals of the late
twentieth century Among philosophers he is best known
for his work in moral philosophy and on the metaphysics
of mind, especially in connection with issues of personal
identity He also made contributions to classical
philoso-phy, notably Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, 1993), and
wrote an important book on Descartes (Descartes
(Harmondsworth, 1978) ), in which he gives prominence
to the idea of there being an ‘absolute conception of
reality’ inherent in Descartes’s philosophical project
Williams’s work on *personal identity resists easy
sum-mary In general, though, it is marked by a particular
inven-tiveness in devising examples or possible cases to refute or
to develop theses about the physical or mental bases of
per-sonal identity, and by great fertility and incisiveness in
see-ing new ways of approachsee-ing issues This freshness in
tackling problems is a notable feature of much of Williams’s
work, which is widely influential His papers on this topic
are collected in Problems of the Self (Cambridge, 1973).
In moral philosophy, Williams argued against both
Kantian and utilitarian approaches In both cases, he
objects that these views require agents to view themselves
unrealistically as simply one person among others, which
neglects to acknowledge the special significance that a
per-son’s own projects must have for them In particular, he
gives emphasis to the role of emotions in moral
respon-siveness Williams is also sceptical that many of the claims
morality makes for itself (that it is universal, absolutely
binding, and so on) can cogently be justified Many of
these themes are prominent in his Ethics and the Limits of
Philosophy (London, 1985).
Williams chaired the government Committee on
Obscenity and Film Censorship in the late 1970s He held
professorships in London, Oxford, and Berkeley,
Califor-nia, and was Provost of King’s College Cambridge from
1979 to 1987 Not long before his death he completed a
long-awaited book on Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton,
*moral luck; reasons, internal and external
Williamson, Timothy(1955– ) British logician and
episte-mologist, currently Wykeham Professor of Logic at the
University of Oxford
Williamson defends the epistemic theory of
*vague-ness Vague terms have borderline cases Most
philoso-phers assume that there is no fact of the matter about
whether a vague term can truly be applied in a borderline
case Williamson, however, maintains that vague terms
have sharp boundaries, which are in principle inaccessible,
even though they are determined by the ways in which
language is used Since Williamson understands
know-ledge in terms of margin of error principles, which require
that p must be true in all cases sufficiently similar to cases
in which p is known, it remains possible to apply vague
terms knowledgeably In more recent work Williamson has developed a broader epistemological perspective Taking knowledge to be conceptually prior to belief, he offers new perspectives on the plausibility of scepticism, the nature of evidence, the accessibility of our own mental states, and the limits of knowledge j.ber
T Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford, 2000).
will to believe In his 1897 article entitled ‘The Will to Believe’, William James said that, under certain specified conditions, we have a right to let our passional nature decide which of two alternative hypotheses to adopt These are that the matter cannot be settled on intellectual
grounds, and that the choice between them is living (we find each credible), forced (we must act in the light of one
or the other), and momentous (really important) Examples
are the choice between theism and atheism or free will
*voluntarism, doxastic
William James, ‘The Will to Believe’, in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York, 1897).
will to live: see Schopenhauer.
will to power Nietzsche’s formula for what he took to be the basic disposition manifested in all that transpires in human life, and in all other phenomena as well Every-thing that happens in our lives and in the world of which
we are a part, for Nietzsche, may be interpreted in terms of
*power-relationships within and among configurations of forces the basic tendency of which is to assert themselves towards others in an expanding or expending and
trans-forming manner (See e.g Beyond Good and Evil, sect 36;
Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London, 1983), ch 4.
Wilt Chamberlain argument In what is his best-known
argument from Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York,
1974), Robert Nozick asks us to imagine that we are in a society that has just distributed income according to some ideal pattern, possibly a pattern of *equality We are to fur-ther imagine that in such a society someone with the tal-ents of Wilt Chamberlain offers to play basketball for us provided that he or she receives a small fraction of the pro-ceeds from every home game ticket that is sold Suppose
we agree to these terms, and a large number of people attend the home games to watch this super-talented player, thereby securing for him or her a sizeable income Since such an income would surely upset the initial pat-tern of income distribution whatever that happened to be, Nozick contends that this illustrates how an ideal of *lib-erty upsets the patterns required by other political ideals, and hence calls for their rejection j.p.s
*libertarianism; conservatism
958 will
Trang 10Winch, P G (1926–97) A prominent Wittgensteinian,
whose writings explore the implications of the claim that
to understand a language is to understand a *form of life
His most influential work, The Idea of a Social Science, was
highly critical of received empiricist anthropological and
sociological conceptions of understanding human action
It stimulated extensive debate about the methodology of
the social sciences Subsequent writings on the
under-standing of primitive societies were equally influential
Winch’s ethical writings are distinguished not only by
their seriousness, but also by the concreteness of examples
and the attention to the context of moral predicaments, as
well as the texture of life in which they are embedded
p.m.s.h
*social science, philosophy of
P G Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London, 1958).
—— Ethics and Action (London, 1972).
——Trying to Make Sense (Oxford, 1987).
wisdom.A form of understanding that unites a reflective
attitude and a practical concern The aim of the attitude is
to understand the fundamental nature of reality and its
sig-nificance for living a good life The object of the practical
concern is to form a reasonable conception of a good life,
given the agents’ character and circumstances, and to
evalu-ate the situations in which they have to make decisions and
act from its point of view These evaluations are often
diffi-cult because many situations are complex, conceptions of a
good life are incompletely formed, and the variability of
individual character and circumstances render general
principles insufficiently specific Wisdom may be
identi-fied then with good judgement about the evaluation of
complex situations and conceptions of a good life in the
light of a reflective understanding of the human condition
Although wisdom is what *philosophy is meant to be a
love of, little attention has been paid to this essential
com-ponent of good lives in post-classical Western philosophy
It is perhaps for this reason that those in search of it
often turn to the obscurities of oriental religions for
*understanding
B Blanshard, Reason and Goodness (London, 1961).
J Kekes, Wisdom and Good Lives: The Virtue of Reflection (Ithaca,
NY, 1995)
Wisdom, John (1904–93) Professor of Philosophy at
Cam-bridge 1952–68, and at Virginia and Oregon Wisdom was
enormously appreciative and yet critical of the
anti-metaphysical arguments of both G E Moore, with his
emphasis on common sense, and the later Wittgenstein,
who claimed that metaphysical theories are basically
mis-conceptions caused by our failure to appreciate the variety
of functions of ordinary language Wisdom argued on the
contrary that the extraordinary, paradoxical-sounding
claims of poets and scientists, theologians, and
metaphys-icians can be illuminating as well as misleading, and are
often both Plain thought can conceal what extravagant
metaphor reveals—but also vice versa Thus insight can often be obtained only by appreciating the dialectical argument between the apparently obvious and the flam-boyantly surreal, each of which may have something to be said for it
In Other Minds (1952) Wisdom particularly applied
these insights to *scepticism and the philosophy of mind
a.j.l
John Wisdom, Philosophy and Psycho-analysis (Oxford, 1953).
Wissenschaftslehre.German for the ‘theory of science or knowledge’ For Fichte, it is simply philosophy, since no opponent of the enterprise is a philosopher; it derives all knowledge and science from a self-evident axiom: ‘All other propositions will have only a mediate certainty, derived from it, while it must be immediately certain.’
Bolzano’s Wissenschaftslehre (1837) argues (and helped to
convince Husserl) that logic has nothing to do with psychology; it studies non-temporal, non-spatial, ideal objects: proofs, propositions, concepts m.j.i
B Bolzano, Theory of Science (Dordrecht, 1973).
J G Fichte, Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) (New York,
1970)
Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann (1889–1951) The leading analytical philosopher of the twentieth century, whose two major works altered the course of the subject Whether by agreement or by disagreement, whether through understanding or misunderstanding, his influ-ence has moulded the evolution of philosophy from the 1920s
Born in Vienna, he studied engineering, first in Berlin, then in Manchester Gravitating towards philosophy, he went to Cambridge in 1912 to work with Russell He served in the Austrian army in the First World War, and while on active duty completed his first masterpiece (and
only book published in his lifetime) the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) From 1920 to 1926 he worked as a
schoolteacher The next two years were occupied with designing and building a mansion in Vienna for his sister During this period he came into contact with the *Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers much influenced by his early ideas, which, sometimes through misunderstand-ing, were the mainspring of their Logical Positivism In
1929 he returned to philosophical work at Cambridge, where he spent the rest of his teaching life Between 1929 and 1932 his ideas underwent dramatic change, which he consolidated over the next fifteen years Reacting against his own early philosophy, he developed a quite different viewpoint Initially communicated only through pupils, these ideas revolutionized philosophy in mid-century They were given definitive expression in his second
mas-terpiece, the Philosophical Investigations (1953), published
two years after his death Over subsequent decades, a fur-ther dozen unfinished books and four volumes of lecture notes taken by pupils were published
Wittgenstein’s greatest contributions to philosophy can be classified under five headings: philosophy of
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 959