The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 3 pptx

On Using the Book In one way there is little need for an entry in this book to contain cross- references to other entries. This is so since the reader can safely assume that almost every philosophical term which is used for an idea or doctrine or what- ever also has an entry to itself. The same is true of almost every philosopher who is mentioned. That is not all. Entries can be counted on for very many subjects which fall under such common terms as ‘beauty’, ‘causation’, ‘democ- racy’, ‘guilt’, ‘knowledge’, ‘mind’, and ‘time’—all such subjects which get philosophical attention. Still, it seems a good idea to provide occasional reminders of the general pos- sibility of having more lights shed on something by turning elsewhere. And there is often a good reason for prompting or directing a reader to look else- where, a reason of which a reader may be unaware. So occasionally a term in an entry is preceded by an asterisk, indicating that it is the heading or the first word of the heading of another entry. For the same reason an asterisked term or terms may appear on a line at the end of an entry. In some cases the latter references are to related or opposed ideas or the like. In order not to have the book littered with asterisks, they have very rarely been put on the names of philosophers. But it is always a good idea to turn to the entries on the mentioned philosophers. The cross-references are more intended for the browsing reader than the reader at work. For the reader at work, there is an Index and List of Entries at the back of the book. The Index and List of Entries usually gives references to more related entries than are given by cross-references in and at the end of an entry. It is also possible to look up all the entries on, say, aesthetics or American philosophy or applied ethics. The book is alphabetized by the whole headings of entries, as distinct from the first word of a heading. Hence, for example, abandonment comes before a priori and a posteriori. It is wise to look elsewhere if something seems to be missing. At the end of the book there is also a useful appendix on Logical Symbols as well as the appendices A Chronological Table of Philosophy and Maps of Philosophy. abandonment. A rhetorical term used by existentialist philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre to describe the absence of any sources of ethical authority external to one- self. It suggests that one might have expected to find such an authority, either in religion or from an understanding of the natural world, and that the discovery that there is none leads one to feel ‘abandoned’. For existentialists such as Sartre, however, this sense of abandonment is only a prelude to the recognition that ethical values can be grounded from within a reflective understanding of the conditions under which individuals can attain *authenti- city in their lives. Thus the conception of abandonment is essentially an existentialist dramatization of Kant’s rejec- tion of heteronomous conceptions of value in favour of the *autonomy of the good will. t.r.b. *existentialism; despair. J P. Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, tr. P. Mairet (London, 1948). abduction. Abductive reasoning accepts a conclusion on the grounds that it explains the available evidence. The term was introduced by Charles Peirce to describe an inference pattern sometimes called ‘hypothesis’ or ‘*infer- ence to the best explanation’. He used the example of arriving at a Turkish seaport and observing a man on horseback surrounded by horsemen holding a canopy over his head. He inferred that this was the governor of the province since he could think of no other figure who would be so greatly honoured. In his later work, Peirce used the word more widely: the logic of abduction exam- ines all of the norms which guide us in formulating new hypotheses and deciding which of them to take seriously. It addresses a wide range of issues concerning the ‘logic of discovery’ and the economics of research. c.j.h. *induction. C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, vii (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 89–164. Abelard, Peter (1079–1142). Most widely known for his love affair with Héloïse, about which we learn a good deal from his letters to her as well as from his Historia Calamita- tum. He was also one of the great controversialists of his era. After studying under Roscelin (c.1095) and William of Champeaux (c.1100), he established himself as a master in his own right, and one to whom students flocked through- out his career. In the dispute about the nature of *univer- sals he was in the nominalist camp, holding that universals are utterances (voces) or mental terms, not things in the real world. The universality of a universal derives from the fact that it is predicable of many things. Nevertheless, unless a number of things are in the same state, the one universal term cannot be predicated of them. Hence although universals are not themselves real things, it is a common feature of real things that justifies the predica- tion of a universal of them. In his Dialectica Abelard takes up, among numerous other topics, the question, widely discussed in the Middle Ages, of the relation between human freedom and divine providence. If God, who is omniscient, knows that we are going to perform a given act, is it not necessary that we perform it, and in that case how can the act be free? Abelard’s answer is that we do indeed act freely and that it is not merely our acts but our free acts that come under divine providence. God’s foreknowing them carries no implication that we are not free to avoid performing them. a.bro. *Heloïse complex; properties; qualities. Abelard, Dialectica, ed. L. M. de Rijk (Assen, 1970). J. Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (Cambridge, 2002). ableism. Prejudice against people with disabilities, which can take many forms. It can take the form of a prejudice against using sign language with those who are deaf even when only a small percentage of them can master the alternatives of lipreading and speaking. It also shows itself as a prejudice against the use of Braille with the blind or visually impaired even when this makes them less efficient readers than they might be. In general, it is a prejudice against performing activities in ways that are better for disabled people. j.p.s. *disability and morality. Anita Silvers, ‘People with Disabilities’, in Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics (Oxford, 2003). abortion. Human beings develop gradually inside women’s bodies. The death of a newly fertilized human egg does not seem the same as the death of a person. Yet A there is no obvious line that divides the gradually develop- ing foetus from the adult. Hence abortion poses a difficult ethical issue. Those who defend women’s rights to abortion often refer to themselves as ‘pro-choice’ rather than as ‘pro- abortion’. In this way they seek to bypass the issue of the moral status of the foetus, and instead make the right to abortion a question of individual liberty. But it cannot sim- ply be assumed that a woman’s right to have an abortion is a question of individual liberty, for it must first be estab- lished that the aborted foetus is not a being worthy of pro- tection. If the foetus is worthy of protection, then laws against abortion do not create ‘victimless crimes’ as laws against homosexual relations between consenting adults do. So the question of the moral status of the foetus cannot be avoided. The central argument against abortion may be put like this: It is wrong to kill an innocent human being. A human foetus is an innocent human being. Therefore it is wrong to kill a human foetus. Defenders of abortion usually deny the second premiss of this argument. The dispute about abortion then becomes a dispute about whether a foetus is a human being, or, in other words, when a human life begins. Opponents of abortion challenge others to point to any stage in the grad- ual process of human development that marks a morally significant dividing-line. Unless there is such a line, they say, we must either upgrade the status of the earliest embryo to that of the child, or downgrade the status of the child to that of the foetus; and no one advocates the latter course. The most commonly suggested dividing-lines between the fertilized egg and the child are birth and viability. Both are open to objection. A prematurely born infant may well be less developed in these respects than a foetus nearing the end of its normal term, and it seems peculiar to hold that we may not kill the premature infant, but may kill the more developed foetus. The point of viability varies according to the state of medical technology, and, again, it is odd to hold that a foetus has a right to life if the pregnant woman lives in London, but not if she lives in New Guinea. Those who wish to deny the foetus a right to life may be on stronger ground if they challenge the first, rather than the second, premiss of the argument set out above. To describe a being as ‘human’ is to use a term that straddles two distinct notions: membership of the species Homo sapiens, and being a person, in the sense of a rational or self-conscious being. If ‘human’ is taken as equivalent to ‘person’, the second premiss of the argument, which asserts that the foetus is a human being, is clearly false; for one cannot plausibly argue that a foetus is either rational or self-conscious. If, on the other hand, ‘human’ is taken to mean no more than ‘member of the species Homo sapiens’, then it needs to be shown why mere membership of a given biological species should be a sufficient basis for a right to life. Rather, the defender of abortion may wish to argue, we should look at the foetus for what it is—the actual characteristics it possesses—and value its life accordingly. p.s. *applied ethics; double effect. D. Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge, 2002). Rosalind Hursthouse, Beginning Lives (Oxford, 1987). Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘A Defense of Abortion’, in Peter Singer (ed.), Applied Ethics (Oxford, 1986). Michael Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide (Oxford, 1983). Absolute, the. That which has an unconditioned exist- ence, not conditioned by, relative to, or dependent upon anything else. Usually deemed to be the whole of things, conceived as unitary, as spiritual, as self-knowing (at least in part via the human mind), and as rationally intelligible, as finite things, considered individually, are not. The expression was introduced into philosophy by Schelling and Hegel. In the English speaking world it became the key concept of such absolute idealists as Josiah Royce and F. H. Bradley. t.l.s.s. *idealism, philosophical. J. N. Findlay, Ascent to the Absolute (London, 1970). T. L. S. Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh, 1983). absolutism, moral. The view that certain kinds of actions are always wrong or are always obligatory, whatever the consequences. Typical candidates for such absolute prin- ciples would be that it is always wrong deliberately to kill an innocent human being, or that one ought always to tell the truth or to keep one’s promises. Absolutism is to be contrasted with *consequentialism, the view that the rightness or wrongness of actions is determined solely by the extent to which they lead to good or bad conse- quences. A consequentialist could maintain, for example, that *killing is normally wrong because it creates a great deal of grief and suffering and deprives the person who is killed of the future happiness which he/she would have experienced, but that since, in some cases, a refusal to kill may lead to even more suffering and loss of happiness, it may sometimes be right even to kill the innocent. Moral absolutism is linked to, but not synonymous with, a *deontological position in ethics. The latter is the view that certain kinds of actions are intrinsically right or wrong—right or wrong simply because they are that kind of action—independently of the consequences to which they may lead. Killing the innocent, for instance, may be thought to be wrong just because it is the killing of the inno- cent, quite apart from the suffering and loss of happiness to which it will normally lead. A deontological position obvi- ously contrasts with a consequentialist one, and may appear to be the same as absolutism, but in fact the two are distinct. One may hold that killing the innocent is intrinsic- ally wrong, but also accept that in certain extreme cir- cumstances the intrinsic wrongness of killing the innocent may itself be overriden by the appalling consequences 2 abortion which will occur if one refuses to kill. Absolutism builds on a deontological position but adds a stronger claim— not only is the action intrinsically wrong, but its wrong- ness can never be overridden by any consideration of consequences. The absolutist position corresponds to common trad- itional views of morality, particularly of a religious kind— what might be called the ‘Ten Commandments’ idea of morality. Nevertheless, when detached from appeals to religious authority absolutism may appear to be vulner- able to rational criticism. Is it not perverse to maintain that a certain kind of action is simply ruled out, even when the refusal to perform it will lead to even worse conse- quences? Why insist on never killing the innocent, for instance, if in certain circumstances a refusal to do so will mean that more innocent people will die? To be plausible, absolutism needs to be supplemented with some further distinction between different ways in which conse- quences may come about, such as the distinction between *acts and omissions, or the doctrine of *double effect. The absolutist who refuses to condone the killing of the inno- cent, even though more innocent people will die as a result of not doing so, can then say that though the loss of innocent lives is a terrible thing; nevertheless, letting inno- cent people die, or bringing about innocent deaths as an unintended side-effect, is not ruled out by an absolute pro- hibition in the same way as is the intentional killing of the innocent. Whether this is a sufficient defence of abso- lutism remains a matter for debate. r.j.n. *ideals, moral; lying. G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘War and Murder’, in Collected Philosophical Papers, iii (Oxford, 1981). Jonathan Bennett, ‘Whatever the Consequences’, in Analysis (1966). Thomas Nagel, ‘War and Massacre’, in Mortal Questions (Cam- bridge, 1979). abstract entities. The dichotomy between the abstract and the concrete is supposed to effect a mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive ontological classification. The dichotomy is, however, too naïve to be of theoretical use. There are many different ways, themselves vague, to mark the distinction: abstract entities are not perceptible, cannot be pointed to, have no causes or effects, have no spatio-temporal location, are necessarily existent. Nor is there agreement about whether there are any abstract entities, and, if so, which sorts of entity are abstract. Abstract entities, conceived as having no causal powers, are thought problematic for epistemological reasons: how can we refer to or know anything about entities with which we have no causal commerce? Hence the existence of nominalists, who try to do without abstract entities. a.d.o. *universals; nominalism; proposition. B. Hale, Abstract Objects (Oxford, 1987). abstract ideas: see ideas. abstraction. A putative psychological process for the acquisition of a *concept x either by attending to the fea- tures common to all and only xs or by disregarding just the spatio-temporal locations of xs. The existence of abstrac- tion is endorsed by Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (esp. ii. xi. 9 and 10 and iii. iii. 6ff.) but rejected by Berkeley in The Principles of Human Knowledge (esp. paras. 6ff. and paras. 98, 119, and 125). For Locke the capacity to abstract distinguishes human beings from ani- mals. It enables them to think in abstract ideas and hence use language. Berkeley argues that the concept of an abstract *idea is incoherent because it entails both the inclusion and the exclusion of one and the same property. This in turn is because any such putative idea would have to be general enough to subsume all xs yet precise enough to subsume only xs. For example, the abstract idea of tri- angle ‘is neither oblique nor rectangular, equilateral nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once’ (The Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, para. 13). s.p. George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). Stephen Priest, The British Empiricists (London, 1990). abstract particulars: see properties, individual. absurd, the. A term used by existentialists to describe that which one might have thought to be amenable to reason but which turns out to be beyond the limits of rationality. For example, in Sartre’s philosophy the ‘original choice’ of one’s fundamental project is said to be ‘absurd’, since, although choices are normally made for reasons, this choice lies beyond reason because all reasons for choice are supposed to be grounded in one’s fundamental pro- ject. Arguably, this case in fact shows that Sartre is mis- taken in supposing that reasons for choice are themselves grounded in a choice; and one can argue that other cases which are supposed to involve experience of the ‘absurd’ are in fact a *reductio ad absurdum of the assumptions which produce this conclusion. The ‘absurd’ does not in fact play an essential role within existentialist philosophy; but it is an important aspect of the broader cultural con- text of existentialism, for example in the ‘theatre of the absurd’, as exemplified by the plays of Samuel Beckett. t.r.b. *abandonment; existentialism. A. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (London, 1955). J P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. H. Barnes (London, 1958), 479. academic freedom. An integral aspect of open societies, academic freedom is the right of teachers in universities and other sectors of education to teach and research as their subject and conscience demands. This right, though, may not be unproblematically applicable, even in free societies. Should academic freedom be extended to those perceived by others as using it to interfere with the rights academic freedom 3 of others, or to pursue morally objectionable research? Like other *freedoms, in practice academic freedom is constrained by often tacit conventions regarding its limits. One should never underestimate the ingenuity of aca- demics themselves in justifying denials of academic freedom to their colleagues. a.o’h. *persecution of philosophers; teaching and indoctrinat- ing. C. Russell, Academic Freedom (London, 1993). Academy, the. The educational institution founded by Plato, probably around 387 bc, so-called because of its location at a site sacred to the hero Academus. It is fanciful to call the Academy a ‘university’ or ‘college’. The best idea we have of the subjects studied there comes from Plato’s dialogues themselves and Aristotle’s testimony. When Plato died, the leadership of the Academy passed to his nephew Speusippus. About 275 the so-called Middle Academy came to be dominated by *Sceptics under the leadership of Arcesilaus. This dominance continued through the middle of the second century when Carneades founded the New Academy. In 87/6 Antiochus of Ascalon broke away from the sceptical tradition of Pla- tonic interpretation to try to recover what he regarded as a more authentic form of Platonism. Since the physical structures of the original Academy had been destroyed with the fall of Athens in 88, Antiochus’ Academic leader- ship was more notional than real. Though the Academy was revived in the later fourth century ad, it was destroyed finally by Justinian in 529. l.p.g. *philosophy, history of centres and departments of. J. Dillon, The Heirs of Plato: A Study of the Old Academy 347–274 BC (Oxford, 2003). —— The Middle Platonists 80 BC to AD 220 (Ithaca, NY, 1977). access, privileged: see privileged access. accident. The term ‘accident’ in philosophy has two main uses, both stemming from Aristotle. In the first an acci- dent is a quality which is not essential to the kind of thing (or in later philosophers, to the individual) in question. ‘Being musical’ is accidental to Socrates, ‘being rational’ and ‘being an animal’ are not. Which *qualities, if any, are essential or non-accidental is a controversial matter in contemporary philosophy. In the second main use, the term ‘accident’ is a way of allowing chance and causality to coexist: digging for truffles I turn up some treasure. The digging was not an accident, and since the treasure was there all along, my finding it if I dug there was determined; none the less, my finding of it was accidental, since my dig- ging was a digging for truffles, not for treasure. Typically, events which are accidental under one description are determined under another. In non-philosophical contexts the term often connotes harmful accidents. j.j.m. *properties, general. J. L. Austin, ‘A Plea for Excuses’, in Philosophical Papers (Oxford, 1961). Irving Copi, ‘Essence and Accident’, in Stephen P. Schwartz (ed.), Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds (Ithaca, NY, 1977). Achilles paradox. A paradox of motion, due to Zeno of Elea. In a race, Achilles can never catch the tortoise, if the tortoise is given a head start. For while Achilles closes the initial gap between them, the tortoise will have created a new gap, and while Achilles is closing that one, the tor- toise will have created another. However fast Achilles runs, all that the tortoise has to do, in order not to be beaten, is make some progress in the time it takes Achilles to close the previous gap. Standard responses include claiming that the argument misconceives the implicit ideas of infinite series and their limits; alternatively, that space is not adequately described in purely mathematical terms. Zeno’s own response is not documented. One hypothesis is that he took the conclusion at face value, as part of a general scepticism concerning matter, space, and motion. r.m.s. *infinity. Mark Sainsbury, Paradoxes (New York, 1988), ch. 1. acquaintance and description. A distinction between two kinds of knowledge, crucial to Russell’s philosophy, and analogous to that between connaître and savoir. We are not acquainted with Sir Walter Scott, so we know him only by description, for example as the author of Waverley. By contrast, we can know one of our experiences ‘by acquaintance’, that is, without the intermediary of any definite description. More generally, to know a thing by description is to know that there is something uniquely thus and so; to know a thing by acquaintance is for it to come before the mind without the intermediary of any description. Knowledge by description involves know- ledge of truths, whereas knowledge by acquaintance does not: it is knowledge of things. For Russell, acquaintance is basic on two counts: all understanding rests upon acquaintance (with what the word or concept stands for); and all knowledge of truths depends upon acquaintance with those things which the truths concern. r.m.s. *descriptions, theory of. B. Russell, ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description’, in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vi (Lon- don, 1992); first pub. in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1911). —— The Problems of Philosophy (London, 1912), ch. 5. action. An action is sometimes defined as someone’s doing something intentionally. The phenomenon of human action owes its importance both to questions about *agents’ metaphysical status, and to ethical and legal questions about human *freedom and *responsibil- ity. Recently many philosophers have thought that an account of action (the phenomenon) should proceed via an account of actions (events). When an action is defined as someone’s doing something intentionally, actions are 4 academic freedom taken to be a species of event, and events are taken to be particulars which can be described in different ways. On this account, Jane’s moving of her fingers against the key- board, where it results in sounds of piano playing, is Jane’s playing of the piano. Thus Jane does two things—move her fingers and play the piano—although there is only one action here. Typically someone who does something does several ‘linked’ things, each one being done by or in doing some other. (*Basic action.) According to the definition, for there to be an action a person only has to have done intentionally one (at least) of the things she did. So Jane’s waking up the neighbours could be an action, even though she didn’t intentionally wake them: it would be, if it were also her playing of the piano, and she did play the piano intentionally. When this definition is combined with the thought that it is by moving her body that a person does anything, the claim that actions are bodily movements is made: every action is an event of a person’s moving (the whole or a part of) her body. The definition is not uncontroversial. Some philoso- phers (such as Goldman) deny that a person’s doing one thing can be the same as her doing another; they believe that events should be ‘finely individuated’, not ‘coarsely’, so that only some actions, not all of them, are bodily movements. Other philosophers deny that actions are events at all: either they think that there are no such things as particular events, or they allow that there are events but say that actions are not among them. Even a proponent of the definition will acknowledge that it does not cover all of the ground where attributions of responsible agency can be made. (1) A person may be said to have done something when she keeps perfectly still—when, apparently, no event occurs. In such cases, it seems intuitively right that to say there is an instance of action only if the person intentionally kept still. Thus it may still be thought that ‘doing something intentionally’ marks out action: the original definition can be seen to be basically right, but it has to be conceded that there is not always an event when there is an instance of action, and that no fully general link can be made between action and bodily movement. (2) A person may be answerable for doing something that she didn’t intentionally do: for instance, when she starts a fire by idly throwing away her lighted cigarette. To cover cases like this, more resources than the word ‘intentionally’ are needed. But further elu- cidation of ‘intentionally’ may uncover a range of con- cepts which can in turn illuminate a broad conception of responsible agency. A person’s doing of something intentionally, it may be argued, always results from that person’s believing some- thing and her desiring something, which jointly constitute her having a reason to do the thing. The definition of actions, then, may be part of a view according to which a certain sort of causal history distinguishes actions from other events. Such a view fell from philosophical favour in the 1950s and 1960s, but has by now been largely restored to credibility. The view has many variants. In a traditional empiricist version, each action is caused by a *volition. In some quarters, the traditional version has been sup- planted by the thesis that each action is itself an event of someone’s *trying to do something: the suggestion is that a person’s having a reason to do something leads her to attempt to do it, and then, when her attempt actually has the effects she wants, as usually it does, it is her doing the thing intentionally. Giving someone’s reasons is a matter of saying why she did what she did, so that the idea of a distinctive kind of explanation—action explanation—enters the picture when an action is seen to result from someone’s having a reason. (*Reasons and causes.) Also introduced is the idea of a distinctive kind of thinking from which action issues— *practical reason, or deliberation, an account of which requires understanding of (at least) *belief, desire, valuing, *intention, and choice. j.horn. *choosing and deciding; mental causation. D. Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1980). A. I. Goldman, A Theory of Human Action (Princeton, NJ, 1970). J. Hornsby, Actions (London, 1980). A. Mele (ed.), The Philosophy of Action (Oxford, 1997). action, basic: see basic action. action at a distance. That one event could have direct causal influence on another spatially separated from it without causation being propagated continuously from point to point has often been met with scepticism. In the nineteenth century field theories ‘filled in’ the causation between particles with spatially continuous fields. But field theories have their own problems, especially with the interaction of the source particle of the field with its own generated field. These have led to contemporary action at a distance theories of interaction. In order to conform to the observed facts and to relativity, these must posit a time delay between cause and spatially distant effect. In order to account for the behaviour of the source, both retarded and advanced effects must be posited. While the denial of action at a distance is built into quantum field theory and into many accounts of causation (Hume, Reichenbach, Salmon), the famous space-like correlations of *quantum mechanics are a difficulty for those who deny action at a distance. l.s. *causality. P. Davies, The Physics of Time Asymmetry (Berkeley, Calif., 1974), sect. 5.8. J. Earman, A Primer of Determinism (Dordrecht, 1986), ch. 4, sects. 7, 8. active and passive intellects. Two powers relating to conceptual thought associated with Aristotelian philoso- phy. In De anima Aristotle distinguishes between the *mind as a capacity for conceptual thinking (the passive intellect), and another power (the active intellect) which forms concepts and activates the latent capacity for thought. The interpretation of these notions has been a active and passive intellects 5 matter of controversy since antiquity and remains unre- solved today. Some medieval Arabic commentators regarded the active intellect as a single immaterial princi- ple to which all thinkers are related; other medievals held this to be so in respect of both intellects. Aquinas argued instead that the two intellects are simply powers of the mind of each thinker. Conceived in this way the distinc- tion corresponds to that recurrent in cognitive psychology between concept-forming and concept-employing capaci- ties. It also bears upon the debate between nativism and abstractionism in relation to the source of *ideas. j.hal. *acts, mental. Z. Kuksewicz, ‘The Potential and the Agent Intellect’, in N. Kret- zmann, A. Kenny, and J. Pinborg (eds.), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1982). acts and omissions. The moral distinction between acts and omissions amounts to the claim that there is a morally significant difference between a particular action and a corresponding failure to act, even though they have the same outcomes. Thus, it is said that there is a moral differ- ence between, for example, lying and not telling the truth, hindering and failing to help, and between *killing and letting die, even though, in each case, the consequences of the action and the omission may be the same. There is undoubtedly some obscurity about the distinc- tion. Understanding it is complicated by the somewhat untidy concept of an omission. Roughly speaking, an omission of mine may be said to occur when I fail to do something which I might reasonably have been expected to do. Such an omission may or may not be a matter of moral censure, depending on what duties I have and what expectations they give rise to. However, since the fact that something is an omission settles no moral questions, it is mistaken to interpret the acts–omissions distinction as straightforwardly differenti- ating between what we are obliged not to do and what we are allowed to do. Hence it is not the claim that killing, for instance, is morally forbidden while letting die is morally permissible. Nor does it seem helpful to see the distinction as hanging on a difference in intention, for, clearly, both a case of killing and a case of letting die would have to be intentional, as opposed to accidental, to raise serious moral questions. The point of the distinction seems rather to be to assert that there are prima-facie differences in gravity in the moral logic of the two areas, i.e. that cases of positive commission require reasons that are morally weightier than, and perhaps different in kind from, those that would justify an omission. Thus not killing and not lying, for example, are held to be morally more basic than saving lives and telling the truth, even though the latter are also a matter of moral duty. As a cornerstone of *deontological ethics, the acts– omissions distinction is vulnerable to the usual criticisms by *consequentialism and its proponents. But some of these criticisms are misguided: utilitarian dismissals of the distinction are often based on the idea that it amounts to, for instance, a denial of the duty to save life. Yet one does not have to refute the distinction to establish the moral duty to save lives. If we can be held just as responsible for the things we fail to do as for the things we do, we need not deny what the distinction asserts—that there is a differ- ence between the moral ground we should be able to take for granted and the moral ground we have to struggle con- tinuously to gain. p.w. *absolutism, moral. E. D’Arcy, Human Acts (Oxford, 1963). acts, linguistic: see linguistic acts. acts, mental. (1) Mental actions; or, less commonly, (2) *mental events in general. Mental events that are not mental actions include suddenly remembering where one left one’s keys and noticing that it is raining. Paradigmatic mental actions include adding numbers in one’s head, deliberating, and (one some views) choosing and trying. The precise difference between mental events that are actions and those that are not is a vexed question (some- times examined under the rubric ‘activity versus passiv- ity’). Whether there is a single concept of action that includes both mental actions and actions essentially involving peripheral bodily movement is controversial. The promising idea that actions are analysable as events with ‘the right sort’ of psychological–causal history may provide the key to both questions, provided that the right sort of history does not itself essentially include actions. a.r.m. *active and passive intellects; mental states; volitions. B. O’Shaughnessy, The Will: A Dual Aspect Theory (Cambridge, 1980). Adams, Marilyn McCord (1943–).American philoso- pher (at Michigan, UCLA, Yale, and Oxford) who has writ- ten particularly on medieval philosophy and in philosophy of religion. She is the author, inter alia, of numerous papers on various topics, and of a monumental two-volume study of William of Ockham (1987). She has written on the problems of *evil. For example, in ‘Hor- rendous Evils and the Goodness of God’, considering ‘evils the participation in (the doing or suffering of ) which gives one reason prima facie to doubt whether one’s life could . . . be a great good to one on the whole’, she argues that ‘the how of God’s victory’ can be rendered intelligible for Christians ‘by integrating participation in horrendous evils into a person’s relationship with God’. Her work often offers solutions for believers using terms internal to Christian tradition. Arguably, it also clarifies religious views for non-believers. Spouse of R. Adams. e.t.s. *Anselm. Marilyn McCord Adams, ‘Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God’, in Marilyn McCord Adams and Robert Merrihew Adams (eds.), The Problem of Evil (Oxford, 1990). 6 active and passive intellects Adams, Robert M. (1937– ). American philosopher (at Michigan, UCLA, Yale, and Oxford) who has done work in philosophy of religion, ethics, metaphysics, and the his- tory of philosophy. His book The Virtue of Faith incorpor- ates diverse aspects of his views in philosophy of religion, with references. Another example of his writing is the paper ‘Involuntary Sins’ (Philosophical Review (1985)), in which Adams argues that persons may be responsible for emotions and attitudes such as anger even if these are not voluntary (subject to direct or indirect control by the will). This paper draws on concepts with a religious his- tory, but has also challenged philosophers who have non- religious interests in the ethics of emotion and in action theory. Adams has, in addition, done influential work on a modified *divine command theory of ethics, and on the problem of *evil, among other topics. Spouse of M. Adams. e.t.s. *Sin. Robert M. Adams, The Virtue of Faith (Oxford, 1987). ——Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (New York, 1994). ——Finite and Infinite Goods (New York, 1999). ad hominem argument. For Aristotle, a *fallacy in which ‘persons direct their solutions against the man, not against his arguments’ (Sophistical Refutations, 178 b 17). Locke sees it as a ‘way to press a man with consequences drawn from his own principles or concessions’ (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, iv. xvii. 21). Locke’s ad hominem, though he does not describe it as a fallacy, is not a proof ‘drawn from any of the foundations of knowledge or probability’. j.woo. *risus sophisticus. John Woods and Douglas Walton, Fallacies: Selected Papers, 1972–1982 (Dordrecht, 1989), chs. 5 and 7. Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903–69). German philosopher, sociologist, and musicologist, who was the most brilliant and versatile member of the *Frankfurt School. He studied philosophy, music, and sociology at Frankfurt and music in Vienna under Alban Berg. In 1934 he was forced to emigrate, first to Oxford, then in 1938 to New York. His thought was permanently marked by the rise of fas- cism, and by the failure of *Marxism both in the West and in the Soviet Union. Political defeat accounts for the sur- vival of philosophy, against Marx’s expectations: ‘Philoso- phy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.’ He and Horkheimer diagnose the ills of modernity in Dialectic of the Enlight- enment (1947; tr. New York, 1972). Another factor shaping Adorno’s thought is *existen- tialism, which was in part a ‘movement of rebellion against the dehumanization of man in industrial society’ (Tillich) and a response to the failure of Marx’s and Hegel’s solutions to it. Despite his criticisms of the existentialists, Adorno shared many of their concerns: Kierkegaard’s reinstatement of subjectivity against Hegel’s supposedly panlogistic and historicist system, Heidegger’s antipathy to technology, and so on. (Adorno’s 1933 habilitation the- sis on Kierkegaard appeared as Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic in 1965.) He criticizes them from a (consider- ably modified) Hegelian–Marxist viewpoint, arguing that they, like more traditional philosophies, misrepresent social and political relations and thereby provide an ideo- logical justification for domination. Even to ignore socio- political relations is to justify them, by suggesting, for example, that the individual is more autonomous than he is: ‘If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset of the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown the screams of its victims.’ But he also subjects them to ‘immanent’ philosophical criticism, applying ‘Hegel’s dictum that in dialectics an opponent’s strength is absorbed and turned against him.’ In Against Epistemology: A Metacritique (1956; but written in Oxford, 1934–7; tr. Oxford, 1982) he applied these methods to Husserl’s half-hearted idealism, arguing that ‘one cannot both derive advantage from this solipsistic approach and transcend its limit’ and that ‘phenomeno- logically speaking,[the fact that it is done] “with the eyes” belongs to the sense of seeing and is not only [the result of ] causal reflection and theoretical explanation’. Adorno invokes Hegel’s belief that everything is mediated against Husserl’s attempt to find an indubitable beginning or foundation for philosophy: ‘The insistence on the medi- atedness of everything immediate is the model of dialectical thinking as such, and also of materialistic thinking, insofar as it ascertains the social preformation of contingent, indi- vidual experience.’ In The Jargon of Authenticity (1965; tr. London, 1973), besides censuring what he saw as Heidegger’s obfuscating and ideological jargon, Adorno criticized him both on a philosophical level (‘In view of our potential, and grow- ing, control over organic processes, we cannot dismiss a fortiori the thought of the elimination of death. This may be very unlikely; but we can entertain a thought, which, according to existential ontology, should be unthinkable’) and on a political level: ‘Heidegger’s dignity is again the shadow of such a borrowed ideology; the subject who based his dignity on the (albeit questionable) Pythagorean claim that he is a good citizen of a good state, gives way to the respect due to him merely because he, like everyone else, must die. In this respect Heidegger is a reluctant democrat.’ Negative Dialectics (1966; tr. New York, 1973) gives a general account of Adorno’s thought. Like Socrates and the early Plato, he wields a negative dialectic and does not, like Hegel and the later Plato, derive a positive result, let alone an all-encompassing system or a philosophy of ‘identity’, from his critique of other philosophers and of social institutions. His aim is to dissolve conceptual forms before they harden into lenses which distort our vision of, and impair our practical engagements with, reality. Real- ity is not transparent to us; there is a ‘totally other’, a ‘non- identical’, that eludes our concepts. Adorno, Theodor 7 When concepts fail us, *art comes to our aid. Aesthetic illusion sustains the hope for an ideology-free utopia that neither theory nor political activity can secure: ‘In illusion there is a promise of freedom from illusion.’ Art, especially music, is relatively autonomous of repressive social struc- tures and thus represents a demand for freedom and a cri- tique of society. This is to be discerned in the formal properties of particular works. Art is ‘concentrated social substance’. Even music commercially mass-produced by the ‘culture industry’ has a social meaning: the repressive irrationality of capitalism. m.j.i. M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (London, 1973). G. Rose, The Melancholy Science (London, 1979). L. Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). aesthetic attitude. The aesthetic attitude is supposedly a particular way of experiencing or attending to objects. It is said to be an attitude independent of any motivations to do with utility, economic value, moral judgement, or peculiarly personal emotion, and concerned with experi- encing the object ‘for its own sake’. At the limit, the observer’s state would be one of pure detachment, marked by an absence of all desires directed to the object. It could be conceived of as an episode of exceptional ele- vation wholly beyond our ordinary understanding of empirical reality (as in Schopenhauer), or simply as a state of heightened receptiveness in which our perception of the object is more disengaged than usual from other desires and motivations which we have. The term ‘disin- terested’ is often applied to such an attitude. Commonly, proponents of the aesthetic attitude think that it can be directed as much to nature as to works of art, and, for some thinkers, it is important that we may adopt an aesthetic attitude towards any object without restric- tion. However, it is questionable whether we can always abandon our instrumental, moral, or emotional attitudes. For a range of different cases to test this question, think of buildings which we live in, war atrocities which we see on film, and the naked human body. The two questions are whether we can, and whether we ever should, adopt a purely aesthetic attitude to these things. In the case of art, an aesthetic attitude theory can support the idea that cer- tain kinds of response are privileged, others discountable on the grounds of failing to take the ‘correct’ attitude towards the object concerned. This assumes that the point of *art is wholly aesthetic. The notion of an aesthetic atti- tude deserves to be treated with some scepticism, as it has been in recent philosophy. c.j. *aesthetic concepts; aesthetic judgement. G. Dickie, ‘The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude’, American Philo- sophical Quarterly (1964); repr. in J. Hospers (ed.), Introductory Readings in Aesthetics (New York, 1969). A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, i, tr. E. F. J. Payne (New York, 1964), Third Book. aesthetic concepts. Term introduced into aesthetic the- ory in Frank Sibley’s landmark 1959 essay of that name. According to Sibley, aesthetic concepts, such as balanced, delicate, anguished, differ from non-aesthetic ones, such as orange, rough, square, in being strongly non-condition- governed, that is, not applicable according to a rule going from non-aesthetic concepts to aesthetic concepts. Aes- thetic concepts, Sibley insisted, were strongly perceptual ones—their presence must be experienced, not inferred— but unlike non-aesthetic perceptual concepts, they require taste, not merely functioning senses, for their dis- cernment, and they are of a higher order than and depen- dent on non-aesthetic perceptual concepts. Sibley’s claim is plainly related to the Kantian notion that the judgement of beauty is not subject to rule. It is important to see that Sibley’s claim is, in terms sug- gested by Monroe Beardsley, a denial of application con- ditions for aesthetic concepts, not a denial of occurrence conditions for them. And one piece of evidence for the cor- rectness of Sibley’s claim concerning the non-condition- governedness of the aesthetic is how finely dependent on the non-aesthetic complexion of an object the application of an aesthetic term appears to be, very small differences in non-aesthetic complexion being able to induce large dif- ferences in the aesthetic terms that apply. Nevertheless, Sibley’s thesis came under attack early on from philoso- phers such as Ted Cohen, who maintained that the aes- thetic/non-aesthetic distinction was untenable, and Peter Kivy, who held that aesthetic terms were in fact condition- governed after all. In more recent discussion, talk of aesthetic concepts has usually been replaced by talk of aesthetic properties, and Sibley’s claim of dependence has been transmuted into talk of the supervenience of aesthetic properties on non- aesthetic properties, including those relating to an object’s appreciative context. Current debate about aesthetic con- cepts turns on the issue of how to delineate clearly the class of such concepts, the issue of whether such concepts essentially involve a normative or evaluative component, and the issue of the defensibility of realism with respect to such concepts. j.lev. *aesthetic attitude. E. Brady and J. Levinson (eds.), Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley (Oxford, 2001). J. Levinson, ‘Aesthetic Supervenience’, in Music, Art, and Meta- physics (Ithaca, NY, 1990). Frank Sibley, Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers, ed. J. Benson, B. Redfern, and J. R. Cox (Oxford, 2001). aesthetic distance. In one version of *‘aesthetic attitude’ theory, aesthetic responses are alleged to occur when people ‘distance’ themselves from an object they perceive, suspending their desires and other feelings, and leaving the mere experience of contemplating it. ‘Distancing’ is also thought of as a feature in understanding artistic repre- sentations. Someone whose own emotions became engaged in an experience of full-blown pity or contempt for a fictional character would be ‘under-distanced.’ c.j. E. Bullough, ‘Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle’, in Aesthetics: Lectures and Essays (London, 1957). 8 Adorno, Theodor aesthetic imagination: see imagination, aesthetic. aestheticism. A term sometimes used pejoratively for a view about the value of *art. More often presupposed than argued for, it is the idea that works of art have value to the extent that they can be appreciated for their aes- thetic merits, and that such appreciation requires no justi- fication by reference to anything outside itself. Aestheticism presupposes both that there is distinctively aesthetic value, and that such value is not derivative from any other kind. An alternative to aestheticism would be instrumentalism, the view that art is valuable, if at all, because it is a means to some end, such as moral improve- ment, knowledge (say, of human psychology or history), or a more cohesive society. For aestheticism, by contrast, art belongs securely in the realm of the aesthetic, and that realm has a wholly autonomous value. c.j. W. Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, in W. E. Buckler (ed.), Walter Pater: Three Major Texts (New York, 1986). L. Tolstoy, What is Art?, tr. A Maude (Indianapolis, 1960). aesthetic judgement. An aesthetic judgement attributes a form of aesthetic value to a thing, of whatever kind. (For most philosophers, not all aesthetic judgements are about art, and not all judgements about art are aesthetic judge- ments.) Kant’s influential theory provides a starting point for analysing such judgements. For Kant, aesthetic judge- ments are distinguished both from the expression of sub- jective likes and dislikes, and from judgements that ascribe an objective property to the thing that is judged. Like sub- jective preferences, they must be made on the basis of an experience of *pleasure; but like property-ascribing judge- ments, they make a claim with which other subjects are expected to agree. Other views would assimilate aesthetic judgements more closely to truth claims about a thing’s properties, or place more emphasis on subjective response, and less on the notion of agreement or correctness. c.j. *aesthetic attitude. I. Kant, Critique of Judgement, tr. J. C. Meredith (Oxford, 1969). aesthetics, history of. Aesthetics, conceived as a distinct discipline or sub-discipline dealing with philosophical questions concerning *art and aesthetic value, is a modern invention, originating in the eighteenth century. Ancient and medieval writers gave consideration to *beauty, artis- tic representation, the *sublime, and the value of the arts, and among these discussions those of Plato (especially in the Republic) and Aristotle (in the Poetics) have been vastly influential and are still studied by aestheticians today. Later writings by, for example, Plotinus, Augustine, and Aquinas are of historical importance for the philosophy of art. However, this sketch will concentrate on major lines of thought concerning art and the aesthetic on the part of philosophers in the modern period, from roughly 1700 onwards. Philosophical aesthetics owes much to German philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including its name (Alexander Baumgarten coined the term in 1735, taking it from the Greek aisthesis, meaning sensation or perception), but also, thanks to Kant, Hegel, and their contemporaries, its first definitive book, its arrival as a systematic discipline, and its period of greatest intellectual fervour. However, the earliest recognizable practitioners of aesthetics were philosophers in the British empiricist tradition. The most important work here is that of David Hume; other figures are Joseph Addison, Francis Hutcheson, Edmund Burke, Alexander Gerard, Lord Kames, and Archibald Alison. These thinkers were broadly in the wake of Locke’s empiricism, but worked on problems of *taste, beauty, and critical judgement in a way that Locke had not. Locke’s contemporary Shaftes- bury addressed such issues prominently, and has some- times been considered the founder of aesthetics, though he never achieves the separation from ethical questions which allows the aesthetic to emerge as an area of investi- gation in its own right. The work often credited with developing the first independent notion of aesthetic response is Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725). Hutcheson attempts to explain the source of our pleasure in beauty, and assigns it to an ‘internal sense’ in addition to the five familiar senses. We are caused by some objects to have ideas of beauty, but their occurring in us is neither determined by know- ledge we have of the object, nor attended by any desire or interest towards it. This effectively sets the stage for many later theories of aesthetic response. A concise early discussion of the problem of *aesthetic judgements is Hume’s essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1757), regarded today as the most important contribution to aesthetics before Kant. Hume starts from an apparent contradiction. Judgements of taste, which in this context are critical judgements about the arts, are founded upon sentiments of beauty, but sentiments make no reference to states of affairs in the world and are merely subjective, so judgements of taste, which are frequently found to be in conflict with one another, might all seem equally ‘right’. Yet there are some judgements which we would regard as clearly wrong, absurd or ridiculous (such as the assertion of ‘an equality of genius between Ogilby and Milton’). How to explain the rightness or greater authori- tativeness of some critical judgements, while acknow- ledging them to be based upon subjective responses? Hume proposes that there must be some standard of taste to settle aesthetic disputes. He mentions the idea of gen- eral principles of taste, though what they are and how they are applied is less clear. He adduces the fact that certain works of classical literature are universally regarded as paradigms. Finally he suggests that some human beings can be found who are ‘true judges’ and whose responses are more authoritative than those of others. These true judges would be characterized by ‘strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice’. Though it remains difficult to see how such judges are to be identi- fied and why we should assume that their judgements will aesthetics, history of 9 . 529. l.p.g. *philosophy, history of centres and departments of. J. Dillon, The Heirs of Plato: A Study of the Old Academy 34 7–274 BC (Oxford, 20 03) . —— The Middle Platonists 80 BC to AD 220 (Ithaca,. motion, due to Zeno of Elea. In a race, Achilles can never catch the tortoise, if the tortoise is given a head start. For while Achilles closes the initial gap between them, the tortoise will. one, the tor- toise will have created another. However fast Achilles runs, all that the tortoise has to do, in order not to be beaten, is make some progress in the time it takes Achilles to close