absence of passion is just evil when it chooses the worse course. This view of the will can be de-moralized by attaching it to long-term objectives generally, or to reflective choice. Yet there are many problems in the whole project of postulating such a rational faculty, which is an unstable structure built too rapidly on some familiar idioms and supposed requirements of experience. j.c.b.g. *reason as the slave of the passions. William Charlton, Weakness of Will (Oxford, 1988). Donald Davidson, Problems of Rationality (Oxford, 2004). Justin Gosling, Weakness of the Will (London, 1990). R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford, 1963). A. Mele, Autonomy, Self-Control and Weakness of Will (New York, 2002). B. O’Shaughnessy, The Will (Cambridge, 1980). S. Stroud and C. Tappolet (eds.), Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality (Oxford, 2003). Albert the Great (c.1206–80). Born in the German town of Lauingen, he studied briefly at Padua, becoming a Dominican in 1223. He was a regent master at Paris (1242–8), during which time Aquinas was one of his stu- dents, and in 1248 the two men became colleagues at Cologne. He was known as doctor universalis because of his encyclopedic knowledge displayed in his voluminous writings. He wrote extensively on scientific matters, and also on theology and philosophy, where he was heavily influenced by the works of Aristotle then reaching the Christian West accompanied by the commentaries of Muslim philosophers, in particular al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯ and Avi- cenna. He was one of the earliest to realize that it was vital to work out a means of squaring Aristotelian philosophy with Christianity, for Aristotle had highly persuasive argu- ments for his doctrines, and those who would be per- suaded by the arguments had to be shown that they could assent to the doctrines without in so doing implying the falsity of the faith. More than anyone it was Aquinas who carried out the task that Albert had recognized to be so necessary. a.bro. *Aristotelianism. J. Weisheipl (ed.), Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays (Toronto, 1980). Albo, Joseph (c.1360–1444?). Jewish philosopher of Castile, author of Sefer ha-Ikkarim (The Book of Principles, 1425). A student of Crescas, well versed in mathematics, medicine, Islamic, Christian, and Jewish philosophy, and biblical and rabbinical learning, Albo spoke in the Tortosa Disputation of 1413–14. Against a backdrop of anti-Jewish polemic, he sought to forge a philosophically defensible Jewish creed centred on God, revelation, and requital, de-emphasizing the Messianic idea, the sorest point of Christian–Jewish polemics. From Aquinas Albo adopted the idea of natural law, arguing, with Maimonides, that the superiority of divine legislation lay in its (credal) provision for spiritual felicity, not just temporal welfare. Grotius and Richard Simon admired him, but Jewish thinkers often resented the idea of a formal creed and fault his lack of originality. l.e.g. Joseph Albo, Sefer ha-Ikkarim, ed. and tr. Isaac Husik, 5 vols. (Philadelphia, 1929–30; first printed ed. Soncino, 1485). Alcmaeon of Croton ( fl. c.450 bc). Medical theorist. He originated the influential quasi-political theory of medi- cine, one version of which was developed into the ‘four humours’ pathology which, through Galen, dominated medieval and early modern medicine. In Alcmaeon’s ver- sion, four opposed ‘powers’ (hot, cold, wet, dry) are natur- ally in balance (because their strengths are everywhere in the right proportion) in the healthy body. A disturbance of the balance in any way means a damaging preponderance of one or more powers, and causes conflict. This is disease; the variety of diseases, and their different natures, are to be explained by the variety of ways and places in which the right proportion can be disturbed. e.l.h. J. Mansfeld, ‘Alcmaeon: “Physikos” or Physician?’, in Kephalaion: Studies in Greek Philosophy and its Continuation Offered to Profes- sor C. J. de Vogel (Assen, 1975). alethic concepts: see deontic logic. Alexander, Samuel (1859–1938). Australian-born, Oxford- educated, Alexander spent his career at Manchester Uni- versity. Trying always to keep abreast of developments in modern science, particularly psychology and biology, Alexander is best known for his theory of ‘emergent evo- lution’, which he expounded in his Space, Time and Deity (1920). His claim was that existence is hierarchically ordered, and that there is an ongoing evolutionary process with the emergence of ever-higher levels of existence. Through time, therefore, new qualities come into being, although Alexander would have thought of these as prin- ciples of organization rather than entities akin to the Bergsonian élan vital. As a man for whom his Jewishness was a significant factor, from his combating prejudice at Oxford to being close to prominent Zionists in Manches- ter, Alexander felt a keen affinity to Spinoza. Like the earlier philosopher, Alexander saw mind as at one with material substance, making itself manifest in the course of evolution. The next and ultimate emergent, Alexander supposed, would be God. One presumes that, at this point, he had left behind the constraints of science, although apparently he carried with him not a few eminent men of science. m.r. *evolution. S. Alexander, Space, Time and Deity (London, 1920). al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯:see Fa¯ra¯bı¯. algebra, Boolean: see Boolean algebra. al-Ghazali: see Ghazali. algorithm. An algorithm is a mechanical procedure for determining the value of a function for any argument 20 akrasia from a specified *domain. For example, addition is a func- tion which maps pairs of natural numbers on to a natural number (the sum of the pair). The simple paper-and- pencil rules for determining the sum of any two numbers are an algorithm for the addition function. A mechanical procedure for deciding whether a given object has a par- ticular property is also called an algorithm. So, for exam- ple, the *truth-table test for deciding whether a formula of the propositional calculus is a tautology is an algorithm. A mechanical procedure can be given as a finite set of instructions which are executed in a stepwise manner, without appeal to random processes or ingenuity. A *function is effectively computable if and only if there is an algorithm for computing it. a.d.o. H. Rogers, Theory of Recursive Functions and Effective Computability (New York, 1967), ch. 1. alienation. A psychological or social evil, characterized by one or another type of harmful separation, disruption or fragmentation, which sunders things that belong together. People are alienated from the political process when they feel separated from it and powerless in relation to it; this is alienation because in a democratic society you belong in the political process, and as a citizen it ought to belong to you. Reflection on your beliefs, values, or social order can also alienate you from them. It can undermine your attachment to them, cause you to feel separated from them, no longer identified with them, yet without furnishing anything to take their place; they are yours, faute de mieux, but no longer truly yours: they are yours, but you are alienated from them. The term ‘alienation’ gained currency through Marxian theory, and is used with special prominence in Marx’s manuscripts of 1844 (which were first published in 1930). Marx derived the terms Entäusserung and Entfremdung from Hegel, who used them to portray the ‘unhappy con- sciousness’ of the Roman world and the Christian Middle Ages, when individuals under the Roman Empire, deprived of the harmonious social and political life pre- vailing in pagan antiquity, turned inward and directed their aspirations toward a transcendent Deity and his other-worldly kingdom. For Hegel, the unhappy con- sciousness is divided against itself, separated from its ‘essence’, which it has placed in a ‘beyond’. Marx used essentially the same notion to portray the situ- ation of modern individuals—especially modern wage labourers—who are deprived of a fulfilling mode of life because their life-activity as socially productive agents is devoid of any sense of communal action or satisfaction and gives them no ownership over their own lives or their products. In modern society, individuals are alienated in so far as their common human essence, the actual co-operative activity which naturally unites them, is power- less in their lives, which are subject to an inhuman power—created by them, but separating and dominating them instead of being subject to their united will. This is the power of the market, which is ‘free’ only in the sense that it is beyond the control of its human creators, enslaving them by separating them from one another, from their activity, and from its products. The German verbs entäussern and entfremden are reflex- ive, and in both Hegel and Marx alienation is always fun- damentally self-alienation. Fundamentally, to be alienated is to be separated from one’s own essence or nature; it is to be forced to lead a life in which that nature has no oppor- tunity to be fulfilled or actualized. In this way, the experi- ence of ‘alienation’ involves a sense of a lack of self-worth and an absence of meaning in one’s life. Alienation in this sense is not fundamentally a matter of whether your con- scious desires are satisfied, or how you experience your life, but instead of whether your life objectively actualizes your nature, especially (for both Marx and Hegel) your life with others as a social being on the basis of a determinate course of historical development. Their view that alien- ation, so conceived, can nevertheless have historical con- sequences, and even be a lever for social change, clearly involves some sort of realism about the human good: it makes a difference, psychologically and socially, whether people actualize their nature, and when they do not, this fact explains what they think, feel, and do, and it can play a decisive role in historical change. a.w.w. *capitalism. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge, 1981). Istvan Meszaros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (New York, 1972). Bertell Ollman, Alienation, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1976). John Plamenatz, Karl Marx’s Philosophy of Man (Oxford, 1975). al-Kindı¯: see Kindı¯. all: see universal proposition. Alston, William P. (1921– ). Although he has contributed to other areas of philosophy, his main interests lie in the areas of epistemology and philosophy of religion. His work on *epistemic justification has been particularly influential, and he has published extensive discussions of religious language. In Perceiving God (1991), these two interests come together in a detailed account of the episte- mology of religious experience. Alston argues that *reli- gious experiences which are taken by their subjects to be direct non-sensory experiences of God are perceptual in character because they involve a presentation or appear- ance to the subject of something that the subject identifies as God. He defends the view that such mystical perception is a source of prima facie justified beliefs about divine manifestations by arguing for the practical rationality of engaging in a belief-forming practice that involves reliance on mystical perception. p.l.q. *God and the philosophers. W. P. Alston, Divine Nature and Human Language (Ithaca, NY, 1989). —— Epistemic Justification: Essays in the Theory of Knowledge (Ithaca, NY, 1989). Althusser, Louis (1918–90). The most influential Marxist philosopher in the 1960s and 1970s, Althusser produced a Althusser, Louis 21 novel form of Marxism by attempting to integrate into it the dominant ideas of *structuralism. Born in Algeria and spending most of his life lecturing at the élite Collège de France, Althusser and his disciples were much influenced by the leading currents of Parisian intellectual life. Althusser’s version of Marxism was in sharp contrast to the Hegelian and humanist interpretations of Marx that had gained prominence in the two decades after the Sec- ond World War. As regards Marx himself, Althusser saw a sharp epistemological break between the earlier humanist writings and the later scientific texts: each was governed by a different problematic or theoretical framework which determined what questions could be asked on what presuppositions. In his view, the young Marx propounded an ideological view of humanity’s *alienation and even- tual self-recovery, strongly influenced by Hegel; whereas the later Marx disclosed a science, a theory of social for- mations and their structural determination. This later Marx, according to Althusser, had inaugur- ated a new type of philosophy which underlay his social scientific analysis. This *dialectical materialism was above all a theory of knowledge. In a distinctly neo-Kantian vein, Althusser saw the task of philosophy as the creation of concepts which were a pre-condition for knowledge. He insisted on the strict separation of the object of thought from the real object. Knowledge working on its own object was a specific form of practice, theoretical practice, of which Marxist philosophy was the theory. When applied to society, the result of this epistemology was the science of historical materialism. Each of the instances of society—economics, politics, ideology—was a structure united within a structure of structures. The complex and uneven relationship of the instances to each other at a specific time was called by Althusser a ‘conjunc- ture’. Every conjuncture was said to be ‘overdetermined’ in that each of the levels contributed to determining the structure as well as being determined by it: determination was always complex. This structured causality resulted in a reading of history as process without a subject—as opposed to the tendency of, for example, Sartre or the early Marx to see human beings as the active subjects of the historical process. Althusser’s account of Marx, in particular its concept of the problematic and its insistence on the relative autonomy of the sciences, was a good antidote both to all types of reductionism and to extreme forms of Hegelian Marxism. But it does contain severe weaknesses which have been re-emphasized by the superficiality of his approach revealed in his autobiography. Its status as an interpretation of what Marx actually said is dubious; since any recourse to a real object is ruled out, it is diffi- cult to see what the criterion of scientificity could be; and, finally, since the science of dialectical materialism is cut off from the social formation, Althusser can offer no satisfactory account of the relation of theory to practice. d.m cl. L. Althusser, For Marx (London, 1965). G. Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory (London, 1987). —— (ed.), Althusser: A Critical Reader (Oxford, 1994). E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (London, 1978). altruism: see egoism and altruism. ambiguity. A word, expression, or sentence is ambiguous if it has two or more distinct meanings, e.g. ‘can’, ‘poor violinist’, ‘Everyone loves a sailor’. In particular contexts it may be clear with which of its meanings a word etc. is used, e.g. ‘can’ in ‘I can do it’, or ‘poor violinist’ when what is under discussion is the merits of orchestral players. s.w. *vagueness; vague objects. Trudy Govier, A Practical Study of Argument, 3rd edn. (Belmont, Calif., 1992). S. Wolfram, Philosophical Logic (London, 1989), ch. 2. 1. ambiguous middle, fallacy of. A categorical syllogism contains two premisses, a conclusion, and three terms. The premisses contain two occurrences of one of the terms, the middle term. It is by virtue of relations of the other two terms to the middle term that the conclusion, containing the other two terms, follows, given other constraints. Where the middle term is ambiguous, with each occurrence differing in meaning, the syllogism is fallacious, and falls under the fallacy of *four terms. An example of the fallacy is the inference of: Bees receive government subsidies. from the premisses Bees are producers of honey. Producers of honey receive government subsidies. r.b.m. C. Hamblin, Fallacies (London, 1970). American philosophy. Philosophizing in the United States has developed apace over the past century and has never been in as flourishing a condition as today, with phi- losophy firmly established as a subject of instruction in thousands of institutions of higher learning. However, the nature of the philosophical enterprise is changing, with the earlier heroic phase of a small group of important thinkers giving way to a phase of dis-aggregated produc- tion in a scattered industry of diversified contributors. Already in colonial times there were various writers who treated philosophical subjects: theologians like Jonathan Edwards and philosophically inclined statesmen like Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson. But such tal- ented amateurs exerted no influence on other identifiable philosophers. More systematic developments had to await the growth of the university system in the nine- teenth century, when academic philosophy was imported from Europe, with idealists dominant at Harvard and Scottish thought dominant at Princeton, while Kantians were prominent in Chicago, Hegelians in St Louis, and Thomists at the Catholic institutions. But even late into the nineteenth century America’s most significant philosophers operated outside the academic system, 22 Althusser, Louis where eccentric thinkers like R. W. Emerson, John Fiske, C. S. Peirce, and Orestes Brownson never managed to obtain a secure foothold. However, with the rising import- ance of the natural sciences, philosophy became the linchpin that linked them to the liberal arts. The Harvard of James and Palmer and such distinguished imports as Santayana and Münsterberg was a harbinger of this, with philosophy here closely joined to psychology. The influx of the scientifically trained philosopher-refugees who crossed the Atlantic after the rise of Nazism greatly inten- sified this linkage of philosophy to the sciences. The era between the two world wars saw a flourishing in American academic philosophy, with people like John Dewey, C. I. Lewis, R. B. Perry, W. P. Montague, A. O. Lovejoy, Ernest Nagel, and many others making substan- tial contributions throughout the domain. And after the Second World War there was an enormous burgeoning of the field. Numerous important contributors to philoso- phy were now at work in America, and the reader will find individual articles on dozens of them in this Companion. However, no characteristically American school or style of philosophizing has developed, excepting one, namely *pragmatism as originated by C. S. Peirce and popularized by William James. The pragmatists saw the validity of standards of meaning, truth, and value as ultim- ately rooted in consideration of practical efficacy—of ‘what works out in practice’. Though highly influential at home, this approach met with a very mixed reception abroad. Bertrand Russell, for example, objected that beliefs can be useful but plainly false. And various contin- ental philosophers have disapprovingly seen in pragma- tism’s concern for practical efficacy—for ‘success’ and ‘paying off’—the expression of characteristically Ameri- can social attitudes: crude materialism and naïve democratic populism. Pragmatism was thus looked down upon as reflecting a quintessentially crass American tenor of thought—a philosophical expression of the Ameri- can go-getter spirit with its success-orientated ideology, and a manifestation of a populist reaction against the chronic ideological controversies of European philoso- phizing—epistemological *rationalism versus *empiri- cism, ontological *materialism versus *idealism, etc. (Americans, de Tocqueville wrote, seek to ‘échapper à l’esprit de système’.) With pragmatism as a somewhat special case, Ameri- can philosophers past and present have, as a group, been thoroughly eclectic and have drawn their inspiration for style and substance from across the entire spectrum of phi- losophizing. In consequence, American philosophizing as a whole reflects the world, with its contributors drawing their inspiration from materialism and idealism, from Aristotle and Kant, from ancient *scepticism and modern *phenomenology, etc. What is distinctive about contem- porary American philosophizing is not so much its ideas (which, taken individually, could have issued from the minds and pens of non-Americans), but rather the enterprise as a whole, viewed as a productive industry of sorts. Perhaps the most striking feature of present-day profes- sional philosophy in North America is its scope and scale. The American Philosophical Association, to which most US academic practitioners of the discipline belong, cur- rently has more than 8,000 members, and the comprehen- sive Directory of American Philosophers for 2002–3 lists well over 12,000 philosophers affiliated to colleges and univer- sities in the USA and Canada. North American philoso- phers are extraordinarily gregarious by standards prevailing anywhere else. Apart from the massive Ameri- can Philosophical Association, there presently exist well over 1,000 different philosophical societies in the USA and Canada, most of them with well over 100 members. In part because of the ‘publish or perish’ syndrome of their aca- demic base, American philosophers are extraordinarily productive. They publish well over 200 books per annum nowadays. And issue by issue they fill up the pages of over 175 journals. Almost 4,000 philosophical publications (books or articles) and a roughly similar number of sym- posium papers and conference presentations appear annu- ally in North America. The comparatively secure place of philosophy in the ‘liberal arts’ tradition of American colle- giate education assures it a numerical size that makes for such professional health. (It is this statistical fact rather than anything coherent in the traditions themselves that has led to the ascendancy of American over British philoso- phy: as with industrial production, America’s intellectual production is of preponderant volume.) To be sure, this variation of philosophical approaches brings conflict in its wake, with each methodological camp and each school of thought convinced that it alone is doing competent work and the rest are at best misguided and probably pernicious. Few philosophers are suffi- ciently urbane to see philosophical disagreement and con- troversy as a form of collaboration. Internecine conflict is particularly acute between the analytic tradition, which looks to science as the cognitive model, and those who march to the drum of continental thinkers who—like Niet- zsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and co.—take not ‘reality’ but cultural artefacts (particularly literature and even philosophy itself ) as the prime focus of philosophical concern. (Since deep-rooted values are at stake, there is no easy compromise here, although in intellectual as in social matters there is much to be said for live and let live.) The total number of doctorates awarded by institutions of higher learning in the USA has been relatively stable at around 100,000 per annum since 1960. But the production of philosophy doctorates has declined substantially (along with that of humanities Ph.D.s in general), sinking from some 1,200 for 1970–5 to less than 600 by the end of the century. But even this meagre replenishment rate still enables the profession to maintain itself at a very substan- tial level. Given the scale of the enterprise, it is only natural and to be expected that such unity as American philosophy affords is that of an academic industry, not that of a single doctrinal orientation or school. The size and scope of the academic establishment exerts a crucial formative American philosophy 23 influence on the nature of contemporary American phil- osophy. It means that two different—and sometimes opposed—tendencies are at work to create a balance of countervailing forces. The one is an impetus to separate- ness and differentiation—the desire of individual philoso- phers to ‘do their own thing’, to have projects of their own and not be engaged in working on just the same issues as everyone else. The other is an impetus to togetherness— the desire of philosophers to find companions, to be able to interact with others who share their interest to the extent of providing them with conversation partners and with a readership of intellectual cogeners. The first, cen- trifugal tendency means that philosophers will fan out across the entire reach of the field—that most or all of the ‘ecological niches’ within the problem-domain will be occupied. The second, centripetal tendency means that most or all of these problem-subdomains will be multiply populated—that group or networks of kindred spirits will form so that the community as a whole will be made up of subcommunities united by common interests (more prominently than by common opinions), with each group divided from the rest by different priorities as to what ‘the really interesting and important issues’ are. Accordingly, the most striking aspect of contemporary American phil- o-sophy is its fragmentation. The scale and complexity of the enterprise is such that if one seeks in contemporary American philosophy for a consensus on the problem- agenda, let alone for agreement on the substantive issues, then one is predestined to look in vain. Here theory diver- sity and doctrinal dissonance are the order of the day, and the only interconnection is that of geographic proximity. Such unity as American philosophy affords is that of an academic industry, not that of a single doctrinal orienta- tion or school. Every doctrine, every theory, every approach finds its devotees somewhere within the overall community. On most of the larger issues there are no dominant majorities. To be sure, some uniformities are apparent at the localized level. (In the San Francisco Bay area one’s philosophical discussions might well draw on model theory, in Princeton possible worlds would be brought in, in Pittsburgh pragmatic themes would be prominent, and so on.) But in matters of method and doc- trine there is a proliferation of schools and tendencies, and there are few if any all-pervasively dominant trends. Balkanization reigns supreme. The extent to which significant, important, and influ- ential work is currently produced by academics outside the high-visibility limelight has not been sufficiently rec- ognized. For better or for worse, in the late twentieth cen- tury we entered a new philosophical era where what counts is not just a dominant élite but a vast host of lesser mortals. Great kingdoms are thus notable by their absence, and the scene is more like that of medieval Europe—a collection of small territories ruled by counts- palatine and prince-bishops. Scattered here and there in separated castles, a prominent individual philosophical knight gains a local following of loyal vassals or dedicated enemies. But no one among the academic philosophers of today manages to impose their agenda on more than a minimal fraction of the larger, internally diversified com- munity. Given that well over 10,000 academic philoso- phers are at work in North America alone, even the most influential of contemporary American philosophers is simply yet another—somewhat larger—fish in a very populous sea. As regards those ‘big names’, the fact is that those bigger fish do not typify what the sea as a whole has to offer. Matters of philosophical history aside, salient themes and issues with which American philosophers are grappling at the present time include: ethical issues in the professions, the epistemology of information processing, the social implications of medical technology (abortion, euthanasia, right to life, medical research issues, informed consent), feminist issues, distributive justice, human rights, truth and meaning in mathematics and formalized languages, the merits and demerits of relativism regarding know- ledge and morality, the nature of personhood and the rights and obligations of persons, and many more. None of these topics was put on the problem-agenda of present concern by any one particular philosopher. They blos- somed forth like the leaves of a tree in springtime, appear- ing in many places at once under the formative impetus of the Zeitgeist of societal concern. Accordingly, philosoph- ical innovation in America today is generally not the response to the preponderant effort of pace-setting indi- viduals but a genuinely collective effort. So much for the question of issues. But what of method- ology and style? Pragmatism and applied philosophy apart, all of the dominant styles of American philosophy in the twentieth century—analytic philosophy, scientistic and logicist philosophizing, neo-Kantianism, phenomen- ology and ‘Continental’ philosophizing at large—origin- ated in Europe. As far as philosophical approaches are concerned, Emerson’s idea of an America moving beyond the dominance of European tendencies and traditions of thought has not been realized, and—given currently per- vasive intellectual globalization—may never be. The extent to which American philosophy rests on European antecedents is graphically reflected in the great divide in the American Philosophical Association between the ‘Analysts’ and the ‘Pluralists’. To all intents and purposes this split mirrored the opposition in the Germany of the 1920s between the followers of Reichenbach and Carnap, on the one side, and those of Heidegger and Gadamer, on the other, the one looking for inspiration and example to science (especially mathematics and physics), the other to humanistic studies (especially literature and philology)— a duality of perspective which itself had deep roots in the philosophizing of nineteenth-century Germany with its opposed allegiances, respectively to the Naturwis- senschaften (Fries, Bolzano, Haeckel) and the Geisteswis- senschaften (Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Dilthey). A century ago, the historian Henry Adams lamented the end of the predominance of an oligarchy of the great and the good in American politics—as it had been in the days of the Founding Fathers. He regretted the emergence 24 American philosophy john dewey represented a distinctively American no- nonsense naturalism in philosophy. He was born in Schopenhauer’s lifetime and outlived Wittgenstein. rudolf carnap had established himself at the forefront of European philosophy when he left Prague for America in 1935. His works exemplify the technical skill and scientific approach of Logical Positivism. w. v. quine, the doyen of American philosophy in the late twentieth century, inherited and promulgated his mentor Carnap’s view that philosophy should be pursued as part of natural science. nelson goodman: a continuing aim of his work was to examine how language relates to experience, from scien- tific enquiry to artistic appreciation. philosophy in america: the twentieth century of a new order based on the dominance of the masses and their often self-appointed and generally plebeian repre- sentatives. Control of the political affairs of the nation had slipped from the hands of a cultural élite into that of the unimposing, albeit vociferous, representatives of ordinary people. In short, democracy was setting in. Precisely this same transformation from the pre-eminence of great fig- ures to the predominance of mass movements is now, 100 years on, the established situation in even so intellectual an enterprise as philosophy. (Not that a sizeable percent- age of people-at-large take any interest in philosophy; in this regard the democratization of the field is something quite different from its popularization.) In its present con- figuration, American philosophy reflects that ‘revolt of the masses’ which Ortega y Gasset thought characteristic of our era. This phenomenon manifests itself not only in politics and social affairs, but even in intellectual culture, including philosophy, where Ortega himself actually did not expect it, since ‘its perfect uselessness protects it’. For what the past century’s spread of affluence and education has done through its expansion of cultural literacy is to broaden the social base of creative intellectual efforts beyond the imaginings of any earlier time. A cynic might characterize the current situation as a victory of the troglodytes over the giants. In the Anglo-Saxon world, at any rate, cultural innovation in philosophy as elsewhere is nowadays a matter of trends and fashions set by substan- tial constituencies that go their own way without seeking the guidance of agenda-controlling individuals. This results in a state of affairs that calls for description on a statistical rather than a biographical basis. (It is ironic to see the par- tisans of political correctness in academia condemning philosophy as an élitist discipline at the very moment when professional philosophy itself has abandoned élitism and succeeded in reinventing itself in a populist recon- struction. American philosophy has now well and truly left ‘the genteel tradition’ behind.) And so the heroic age of American philosophy, in which the work of a few ‘big names’ towered over the philo- sophical landscape like a great mountain range, is now over. One sign of this is that the topical anthology has in recent years gained a position of equality with, if not pre- ponderance over, the monographic philosophical text. Another sign is that philosophers nowadays are not eccen- tric geniuses working in obscure isolation, but work-aday members of the academic bourgeoisie (even if not, as in continental Europe, civil servants). The rapid growth of ‘applied philosophy’—that is, philosophical reflection about detailed issues in science, law, business, social affairs, computer use, and the like—is a particularly striking structural feature of contemporary American philosophy. In particular, the past three decades have seen a great proliferation of narrowly focused philo- sophical investigations of particular issues in areas such as economic justice, social welfare, ecology, abortion, popu- lation policy, military defence, and so on. This situation illustrates the most characteristic feature of much of contemporary English-language philosophizing: the emphasis on detailed investigation of special issues and themes. For better or for worse, anglophone philosophers in recent years have tended to stay away from large-scale abstract matters of wide and comprehensive scope, char- acteristic of the earlier era of Whitehead or Dewey, and generally address their investigations to issues of small- scale detail. In line with the increasing specialization and division of labour, American philosophy has become increasingly technical in character. Contemporary American philo- sophical investigations generally make increasingly exten- sive use of the formal machinery of philosophical semantics, modal logic, computation theory, psychology, learning theory, etc. Unfortunately, this increasing techni- calization of philosophy has been achieved at the expense of its wider accessibility—and indeed even of its accessibil- ity to members of the profession. No single thinker com- mands the whole range of knowledge and interests that characterizes present-day American philosophy, and indeed no single university department is so large as to have on its faculty specialists in every branch of the sub- ject. The field has outgrown the capacity not only of its practitioners but even of its institutions. Do American philosophers exert influence? Here the critical question is: Upon whom? Certainly as far as the wider society is concerned, it must be said that the answer is emphatically negative. American philosophers are not opinion-shapers: they do not have access to the media, to the political establishment, to the ‘think tanks’ that seek to mould public opinion. In so far as they exert an external influence at all, it is confined to academics of other fields. Professors of government may read John Rawls, professors of literature Richard Rorty, professors of linguistics W. V. Quine. But the writings of such important American philosophers exert no influence outside the academy. It was otherwise earlier in the century—in the era of philo- sophers like William James, John Dewey, and George San- tayana—when the writings of individual philosophers set the stage for at least some discussions and debates among a wider public. But it is certainly not so in the America of today. American society today does not reflect the con- cerns of philosophers; the very reverse is the case—where ‘relevant’ at all, the writings of present-day American philosophers reflect the concerns of the society. n.r. *American philosophy today; Canadian philosophy; philosophy, influence of; Harvard philosophy; English philosophy; continental philosophy; analytic philo- sophy. Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphey, A History of Philosophy in America, 2 vols. (New York, 1977). Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy (New Haven, Conn., 1977). —— A History of Philosophy in America: 1720–2000 (Oxford, 2001). Nicholas Rescher, American Philosophy Today (Totowa, NJ, 1994). Interesting perspectives from a continental standpoint are provided in: Gérard Deledalle, La Philosophie américaine (Lausanne, 1983). L. Marcuse, Amerikanisches philosophieren (Hamburg, 1959). 26 American philosophy American philosophy today. Harvard’s W. V. Quine (1908–2000) has had a more profound impact on the shape of *American philosophy in recent decades than any other single figure, even if no history of the period would be complete without attention to philosophers like Wilfrid Sellars (1912–89), David Lewis (1941–2001), Donald Davidson (1917–2003), Jerry Fodor (b. 1936), Saul Kripke (b. 1940), and, in moral and political philosophy, Quine’s colleague John Rawls (1921–2002). Quine’s attack on the distinction between ‘analytic’ statements (those true in virtue of meaning) and ‘syn- thetic’ statements (those true in virtue of empirical fact) cast doubt on the idea that there was a domain of truths (‘analytic’ or ‘conceptual’ truths) that philosophers were uniquely suited to analyse. Quine recommended a radical naturalization of philosophy, such that philosophy would be continuous with empirical science, as its slightly more abstract and reflective branch. Versions of such a pro- gramme have been influential in epistemology (Alvin Goldman and Stephen Stich at Rutgers in New Brunswick) and philosophy of mind (Patricia and Paul Churchland at the University of California at San Diego, Robert Cummins at the University of California at Davis, Fodor at Rutgers), and, more recently, in ethics (Gilbert Harman at Princeton, Peter Railton at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor). Cummins, for example, runs a ‘philosophical lab’ under the slogan ‘no armchair philoso- phy allowed’, while Harman and Railton argue that ethics had better attend to what we learn from empirical psy- chology about the role of character in the explanation of action. With few exceptions, American philosophers of mind take themselves to have an obligation to attend to the findings of psychologists and neuroscientists about the brain and mental life. The interdisciplinary and naturalistic turns in philoso- phy launched by Quine have had other consequences. Philosophers of science, for example, now routinely have expertise in one of the special sciences (physics and biology are the most popular), and, indeed, often publish and par- ticipate in debates in the cognate field (David Malament at the University of California at Irvine and Elliott Sober at the University of Wisconsin at Madison are leading examples). Philosophers of language (such as the University of Southern California’s James Higginbotham) now attend with care to developments in linguistics. Philosophers in almost all fields feel the need to explain how their subject- matter—morality, meaning, free will, consciousness—can be reconciled with a scientific picture of the world. The Quinean attack on analytic truths and conceptual analysis has also had an unintended, and somewhat ironic, consequence: by contributing to the demise of Logical Positivism, which viewed metaphysical inquiries as non- sensical, Quine inadvertently opened the door to a new wave of metaphysical theorizing. Quine’s student, David Lewis, led the way in returning metaphysical inquiry to philosophical respectability (though Lewis, unlike some who followed him, took the findings of empirical science as a constraint on metaphysical claims). Philosophers like Lewis and Kripke offered accounts of modal concepts— such as ‘necessity’ and ‘possibility’—which could then be deployed in understanding a range of traditional meta- physical questions about the nature of causation, free will, meaning, and reference. Metaphysical theorizing about classic questions relating to time, material objects, sub- stance, and change has also flourished. The return to metaphysics has been a prominent feature at several lead- ing American philosophy departments besides Princeton, including those at Rutgers (where it coexists with the nat- uralistic turn, though partly divided along generational lines), MIT (Robert Stalnaker, Stephen Yablo), and Notre Dame (Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, and others). A more minor theme in post-Quinean American phil- osophy has reflected the influence of the later Wittgen- stein’s quietism: his view that philosophical questions were predicated on confusions about language, and so could be dissolved or neutralized. The American pragma- tist philosopher Richard Rorty (b. 1931) popularized (some would say vulgarized) Wittgensteinian, Quinean, and Sellarsian ideas, and reached a large audience outside academic philosophy with his message that philosophy, as traditionally conceived, was over. This, unfortunately, ignored the revival of metaphysical inquiry and the natur- alized approach to philosophical questions which most philosophers took to be Quine’s legacy. The naturalistic and metaphysical developments in American philosophy in recent decades have coincided with a revival of systematic inquiries in moral and political philosophy. Rawls’s 1971 book A Theory of Justice is usually identified as the turning-point away from the mid- twentieth-century view that the only philosophical ques- tions about values were questions about the meaning of evaluative language. Oddly, Rawls never responded directly to mid-century doubts about the objectivity of morality, but his book gave rise, none the less, to a lively literature on timely questions about distributive justice, the nature of rights, equality and freedom, and related topics. Beginning in the late 1970s, naturalistically minded philosophers began returning to the old ‘meta-ethical’ questions (questions about the meaning and objectivity of moral judgements), with Allan Gibbard (University of Michigan at Ann Arbor) breathing new life into the ‘non- cognitivist’ view that normative judgements are really expressive of certain attitudes, rather than descriptive of the world; while the so-called Cornell realists argued, con- versely, that the objectivity of moral judgements could be reconciled with a scientific view of the world. The largesse and largeness of the American university system—with more than 100 doctoral programmes, turn- ing out hundreds of Ph.D.s each year—has made it possi- ble for there to be specialists in every conceivable topic (from medieval logic to Heidegger’s aesthetics), and for departments not in the top ranks of the profession to carve out riches of great distinction. This may go some distance towards explaining the explosion of work in the history of philosophy in recent decades, work that strives to understand figures in their historical context, while also American philosophy today 27 engaging with them as philosophers, and not simply museum pieces from the history of ideas. ( Julia Annas at the University of Arizona, who writes on ancient Greek philosophers, and the late Margaret Wilson of Princeton, who wrote on philosophers of the early modern period, have been influential figures.) Of particular note is the way in which figures outside the English-speaking traditions of philosophy have been incorporated into those traditions, from Allen Wood (Stanford University) on Kant, Hegel, and Marx, to Hubert Dreyfus (University of California at Berkeley) on Heidegger and Husserl. German philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is increasingly a part of philosophical dialogue and debate in American philosophy at the dawn of the twenty-first century. b.l. S. Freeman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge, 2002). C. Hookway, Quine: Language, Experience, and Reality (Stanford, Calif., 1988). H. Kornblith (ed.), Naturalizing Epistemology, 2nd edn. (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1994). R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ, 1979). P. van Inwagen, Metaphysics, 2nd edn. (Boulder, Colo., 2002). amorality. Sometimes but incorrectly used to mean extreme immorality or wickedness, amorality more prop- erly signifies the absence, in a person, of any understand- ing of or concern for moral standards or decencies. In this sense all babies and small children are amoral, but it is usu- ally expected of adults that they should not be. If they are, they will probably commit horrible acts, hence the confu- sion of meanings noted at the start. But whether amorality is significant will depend on how we understand the nature of moral demands and their role in regulating human conduct; often simple good-naturedness is as effective as a sense of duty in promoting peace among per- sons. Amoralists are often depicted as monsters, but the example just given suggests this is not necessarily so. What is true is that they are uncommon. Less dramat- ically, certain acts or choices are amoral, i.e. involve no moral factors, such as choosing cabbage rather than carrots for lunch. n.j.h.d. *evil. B. A. O. Williams, Morality (Cambridge, 1976) contains a brief discussion. amphiboly. That kind of *ambiguity in which the linguis- tic context allows an expression to be taken in more than one way. There are several types, and writers differ over which to include out of: ambiguous grouping or *scope (‘He had wanted to stand on the top of Everest for ten years’), linkage (‘When a horse approaches a car, it should engage low gear’), denotation (‘Catherine disliked Rachel biting her nails’), and part of speech (‘Save soap and waste paper’). c.a.k. C. A. Kirwan, ‘Aristotle and the So-called Fallacy of Equivoca- tion’, Philosophical Quarterly (1979). analogy, argument from, for the existence of God: see teleological argument for the existence of God. analysis is the philosophical method, or set of methods, characteristic of much twentieth-century anglophone phil- osophy, of the type which describes itself as ‘analytic’ to express allegiance to rigour and precision, science, logical techniques, and—perhaps most distinctively of all—care- ful investigation of language as the best means of investi- gating concepts. Analysis is pre-eminently a style, not a body of doctrine. It is piecemeal and particular in its interests. Some of its practitioners have professed hostility to ‘metaphysics’, by which they meant system-building efforts of the kind asso- ciated with Spinoza and Hegel, whose philosophizing might be called synthetic, in that it ventures to construct inclusive explanations of the universe. In sharp contrast, philosophical analysis is best understood by analogy with analysis in chemistry, as being a process of investigation into the structure, functioning, and connections of a par- ticular matter under scrutiny. Although analytic philosophers look back to Aristotle and the British Empiricists, especially Hume, as major influences on their tradition, it is the work of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore at the beginning of the twentieth century which is the proximate source of analysis so called. Moore conceived the philosopher’s task to be a quest for *definitions as a way of clarifying philosophical claims. This involves finding a definition of the concept or prop- osition (not merely the words used to express them) under discussion. One begins with a concept in need of definition (the analysandum) and looks for another concept or con- cepts (the analysans) which will explain or elucidate it. Indeed Moore made the more stringent demand that analysans and analysandum should be strictly equivalent. Russell’s conception of analysis derived from his work in logic. On his view, the surface forms of language can mis- lead us philosophically, as when the grammatical similarity of ‘the table is brown’ and ‘the complexity of the situation is growing’ leads us to think that tables and complexities exist in the same way. We must therefore penetrate to the under- lying logical structure to clarify what is being said. The clas- sic example is provided by Russell’s theory of *descriptions. Suppose someone now asserts ‘The present King of France is wise’. Is the sentence false, or neither true nor false? Rus- sell argued that it is a concealed three-part conjunction asserting that there is a king of France, that there is only one such thing (‘the’ implies uniqueness), and that it is wise. Since the first conjunct is false, the whole is so. These early techniques of analysis were soon extended and varied into practices not restricted either to the giving of definitions or to the attempt to unearth underlying log- ical structure. Some philosophers who would standardly be classified as belonging to the analytic tradition—a broad church—have explicitly repudiated both the claim that language has a hidden logical structure (the later Wittgenstein) and the idea that the chief task of the 28 American philosophy today philosopher is to state definitions. It has indeed been argued that this latter view is in any case inapt, for if definiens and definiendum are strictly equivalent, analysis is trivial; but if not, it is incorrect. Analysis has sometimes been claimed to involve *reduction of one kind of item—in the linguistic mode, a statement or proposition, or set of them; in the material mode, entities of given sorts—to items of another kind. For example, *phenomenalists argue that statements about physical objects are to be analysed into (translated into) statements about sense-data. In the philosophy of mind, *physicalists claim that mental phenomena can be exhaustively analysed in terms of physical phenomena in central nervous systems. This second kind of reductive analysis is eliminative, unlike the first, in holding that it is the reducing class of phenomena which is real or funda- mental, and that talk of phenomena in the reduced class is merely a façon de parler or a function of ignorance. Other conceptions of analysis have been influential. On Michael Dummett’s view, analysis consists on elucidating the nature of thought by investigation of language. The idea is that to get a philosophical understanding of our- selves and the world, we have to proceed by way of what we think about these matters; but our chief and perhaps only access to what we think is what we say; so analysis comes down to the philosophical study of meaning. For P. F. Strawson analysis is the descriptive task of tracing con- nections between the concepts in our scheme of thought, with a view among other things to seeing what order of dependence obtains among them, thereby helping us to see why, for example, various forms of scepticism need not trouble us. These remarks show that the concept of analysis is not univocal; there is no one method or set of methods which can be claimed as definitive of it. Philosophers in the ana- lytic tradition have in practice agreed with the celebrated dictum of Deng Xiaoping concerning methodology, that ‘it does not matter whether a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice’. But although there is no defining method of analysis, there can be said to be a defining manner, embodied in the ideal characterized in the opening paragraph above as any careful, detailed, and rigorous approach which throws light on the nature and implica- tions of our concepts, characteristically revealed by the way we employ them in discourse. a.c.g. *analytic philosophy. A. Flew (ed.), Essays in Conceptual Analysis (London, 1956). F. Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (Oxford, 1998). G. E. Moore, ‘Replies to my Critics’, The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, ed. P. A. Schilpp (Evanston, Ill., 1942). Bertrand Russell, Essays in Analysis, ed. D. Lackey (London, 1973), esp. ‘On Denoting’. analytic and synthetic statements. According to Kant, an analytic statement (or judgement) is one in which the concept of the predicate is already contained, or thought, in the concept of the subject—an example would be the statement that a vixen is a female fox—whereas a syn- thetic statement is one in which this is not so, for instance, the statement that foxes are carnivorous. The *Logical Positivists, adopting the linguistic turn, held that an ana- lytic statement is one which is true or false purely in virtue of the meanings of the words used to make it and the grammatical rules governing their combination. This def- inition has the advantages that it does not have application only to statements of subject–predicate form and avoids either reliance on the obscure notion of ‘containment’ or appeal to psychological considerations. Both Kant and the Logical Positivists assumed that true analytic statements must express necessary truths knowable *a priori, though Kant also held that some synthetic statements express such truths, including mathematical statements like ‘7 plus 5 equals 12’ and metaphysical statements like ‘Every event has a cause’. The Logical Positivists, by contrast, held mathematical truths to be analytic, and metaphysical statements to be nonsensical or meaningless. Most contemporary philosophers are very wary of appearing to endorse the analytic–synthetic distinction following W. V. Quine’s devastating onslaught upon it (though Grice and Strawson subsequently mounted a vig- orous rearguard defence of its validity). Quine argues that this supposed distinction cannot be defined save (circu- larly) in terms which already presuppose it and that, in any case, it depends upon an untenable view of meaning. The positivists had adopted a verificationist theory of *mean- ing according to which there is a sharp distinction to be drawn amongst meaningful statements between those which can only be known to be true on the evidence of experience (synthetic statements) and those which are verifiable independently of any possible experience and which are therefore immune to empirical falsification (analytic statements). Quine, however, contends that no such sharp distinction can in principle be drawn, because our statements are not answerable to the court of experi- ence individually, but only collectively—and any statement, even a supposed ‘law’ of logic, is potentially revisable in the light of experience, though some revisions will have more far-reaching implications than others for the rest of our presumed knowledge. e.j.l. H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson, ‘In Defence of a Dogma’, Philo- sophical Review (1956). W. V. Quine, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, in From a Logical Point of View, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, Mass., 1961). analytic philosophy began with the arrival of Wittgen- stein in Cambridge in 1912 to study with Russell and, as it turned out, significantly to influence him. Between the wars, through the influence of Russell’s writings and Wittgenstein’s own Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), analytic philosophy came to dominate British philosophy. In the 1930s the ideas of Russell and Wittgenstein were taken up and put forward more radically and systematic- ally by the Logical Positivists of the *Vienna Circle and Reichenbach’s circle in Berlin. There were sympathetic groups in Poland and Scandinavia and some scattered but analytic philosophy 29 . projects of their own and not be engaged in working on just the same issues as everyone else. The other is an impetus to togetherness— the desire of philosophers to find companions, to be able to interact. terms. The premisses contain two occurrences of one of the terms, the middle term. It is by virtue of relations of the other two terms to the middle term that the conclusion, containing the other. alienate you from them. It can undermine your attachment to them, cause you to feel separated from them, no longer identified with them, yet without furnishing anything to take their place; they are yours, faute