The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 6 ppsx

distinguished adherents in the United States (to which many of the European positivists fled from Hitler), such as Nagel and Quine. The very different ideas of the later Wittgenstein, who came back to Cambridge in 1929, closer to those of Russell’s original ally G. E. Moore, became increasingly influential and, under the label *‘linguistic philosophy’, prevailed in most of the English- speaking world from 1945 until about 1960. In the post- positivist era from then until the present English-speaking philosophy has been mainly analytic in the older, pre-linguistic sense, but with large variations of method and doctrine. There had been some anticipations of analytic philosophy before Russell achieved philosophical maturity. The first is possibly Bernard Bolzano, a brilliant, isolated, and largely neglected Czech. Gottlob Frege, W. K. Clifford, Karl Pearson, Ernst Mach, and Henri Poincaré were all serious mathematicians, several of them highly creative and original, and they wrote philosophy, as did their more self-consciously analytic successors, in something of the style of a mathematical treatise: impersonal and objective, with terms explicitly defined and arguments formally and rigorously set out. That distinguishes them from the great fellow-travellers of analytic philosophy, Hume and J. S. Mill. Russell and Moore emerged as original thinkers in the first decade of the century when they broke demonstra- tively away from the kind of Bradleian idealism which they had been taught. They argued against the view that reality is both an undissectable unity and spiritual in nature, that it is a plurality made up of an indefinite multiplicity of things, and that these things are of fundamentally different kinds—material and abstract as well as mental. They fatally undermined the idealist theory that all relations are internal or essential to the things they relate and, less persuasively, that the direct objects of per- ception are subjective contents of consciousness. In the first decade of the twentieth century Moore was the leader, Russell being fully engaged in his work in mathematical logic. Moore’s immensely methodical work had a quasi-mathematical quality, and he was perhaps the first to describe it as analysis. What he meant by that was the careful elaboration in the most lucid possible way of the precise meaning of the problematic assertions he was discussing, to make them available for critical scrutiny. That entangled him in the toils of the so-called paradox of analysis (if analysis reveals A to be identical to BC, how can ‘A = BC’ amount to more than the empty truism ‘A = A’?). During this decade Russell’s main work was in logic. He defined the basic concepts of mathematics in purely logical terms and attempted, less successfully as it turned out, to deduce the fundamental principles of mathematics from purely logical laws. In his theory of descriptions he pro- vided a new kind of definition, a definition in use or con- textual definition, which did not equate synonym with synonym but gave a rule for replacing sentences in which the word to be defined occurred with sentences in which it did not. This was described by F. P. Ramsey as the ‘paradigm of philosophy’. Working in conjunction with Wittgenstein between 1912 and 1914 Russell elaborated the *‘logical atomism’ set out rather casually in his Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) and Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918) and more systematically, but obscurely, in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. All our significant thought and discourse, they held, can be analysed into elementary propositions which directly picture states of affairs, the complexes analysed being composed by the relations symbolized by the logical terms ‘not’, ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘if’, and, perhaps, ‘all’ (Russell thought it irreducible, Wittgenstein did not). The truth, or falsity, of the complex propositions was unequivocally determined by the way in which truth and falsity were dis- tributed among their elementary components. Some complexes were true whatever the truth-value of their elementary components. These were the truths of logic and mathematics. Both believed that the true logical content of complex propositions is concealed by ordinary language and can be made clear only by their kind of reductive analysis. Prop- ositions which cannot be analysed into elementary statements of fact are ‘metaphysical’, for example those of morals and religion. They also held that elementary propositions represented the world as it really is. But the ontological conclusions they drew from this were different. Wittgenstein took it to reveal the general form of the world. Russell, giving elementary propositions an empiri- cist interpretation as the immediate deliverances of sense, arrived at the neutral monist conclusion that only experi- ential events really exist; the minds which have the experiences and the physical things to which the experiences attest are merely constructions out of experience, not independently existent things. He drew here on the analy- ses of material particles, points in space, and instants of time, put forward in the early 1920s by A. N. Whitehead, the collaborator in his early logico-mathematical work. The Vienna Circle, led by Carnap and Schlick, took over the conception of philosophy as reductive logical analysis and the doctrine of the analytic (purely formal, factually empty) character of logic and mathematics. They followed Russell in taking elementary propositions to be reports of immediate experience and developed from this the principle that verifiability in experience is the criterion of meaningfulness. Deprived of significance by this criterion, judgements of value are imperatives (or expressions of emotion) not statements and the affirma- tions of the metaphysician or theologian are at best a kind of poetry. But they rejected the analytic ontologies of their predecessors. Against Wittgenstein they contended that language is conventional, not pictorial. Against Russell they maintained that bodies and minds are no less really existent than events, despite being constructions rather than elements. *Logical Positivism was memorably introduced to the English-speaking world in A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936). But as it became the height of philosophical 30 analytic philosophy fashion a new tendency was in the making in Wittgen- stein’s fairly esoteric circle. Language, he came to hold, in his new philosophical incarnation, is not simply descrip- tive or fact-stating, it has a multiplicity of uses and its meaning consists in the way it is used. It does not have a logical essence which it is the business of analysis to reveal; it has, rather, a natural history which it is the therapeutic, puzzlement-alleviating task of philosophy to describe. Our beliefs, about the mental states of other people for example, cannot be analysed into the evidence we have for them; that evidence is more loosely related to the beliefs as ‘criteria’ of their truth. This mood of acceptance, rather than large-scale reconstruction or reinterpret- ation, of ordinary discourse, has some affinity with the resolute pedestrianism about common sense and ordinary language which Moore had been practising for a long time. It took a different form in post-war Oxford: breezily definite with Ryle, scrupulously lexicographic with J. L. Austin. This is the linguistic philosophy which, centred at Oxford, was dominant in the English-speaking world from 1945 to about 1960, when it disappeared in its original form almost without trace. Philosophical analysis, in a more or less Russellian spirit, but in a considerable variety of forms, has continued from its revival around 1960 to the present day. Quine’s famous essay ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (1951) seemed to undermine the whole analytic project. He claimed that there was no theoretically adequate way of distinguishing identity of meaning from identity of refer- ence, on the ground that there is no scientifically respect- able ‘criterion of synonymy’. The alleged findings of philosophical analysis, therefore, are no more than general factual beliefs we are specially unwilling to abandon in the face of apparently contrary evidence. Quine’s view was received with great respect and was very little criticized, but philosophers went on very much as before. Quine’s own philosophy is analytic in tone. His argument is not obviously convincing. Is a scientific criterion of sameness of meaning really needed? The verificationist theory of meaning was widely criticized, for the most part as self-refuting, by no one more effectively, perhaps, than by Popper, who based a new account of the nature of science on the thesis that falsifiability is a criterion, not of meaning, but of scientific status. The two most notable specimens of reductive analysis (the phenomenalist conception of material things as systems of appearances, actual and possible, and the behaviourist theory of states of mind as dispositions of human bodies to behave in certain ways in particular circumstances) were generally dis- carded, most thoroughly in the work of various Australian materialists, for instance D. M. Armstrong and J. J. C. Smart. They held that we have direct, if inherently fallible, awareness of material things and that the mental states of which we are aware in self-consciousness are in fact identical with brain-states which cause behaviour. There is not much literal analysis in the work of prominent late twentieth-century practitioners of analytic philosophy such as Putnam and Nozick. But they think and write in the analytic spirit, respectful of science, both as a paradigm of reasonable belief and in conformity with its argumentative rigour, its clarity, and its determination to be objective. a.q. *analysis; British philosophy today; verification principle; Oxford philosophy; reductionism. Brand Blanshard, Reason and Analysis (London, 1962). M. Dummett, Origins of Analytic Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1994). John Passmore, Recent Philosophers (London, 1985). Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (London, 1918). Anders Wedberg, History of Philosophy, iii (Oxford, 1984). analytic, transcendental: see transcendental analytic; Kant. anamnesis. Recollection (Greek). Plato argued that some knowledge could have been acquired only by our immortal souls’ acquaintance with the *Forms before our birth and not through sense-experience. ‘Learning’ is therefore anamnesis. In Meno, Socrates elicits geometrical knowledge from a slave-boy, while in Phaedo he argues that knowledge of concepts like equality, which are always imperfectly instantiated in this world, could come only from anamnesis. r.cri. *memory. anarchism. In its narrower meaning anarchism is a theory of society without state rule. In its broader meaning it is a theory of society without any coercive authority in any area—government, business, industry, commerce, religion, education, the family. Although some of its advocates trace its roots back to Greek thinkers—such as the Stoics, especially Zeno (336–264 bc)—or to the Bible, the modern work generally recognized as presenting the first articulation and defence of anarchism is William God- win’s An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793). Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) is credited with being the first person to call himself an anarchist. There is no single defining position that all anarchists hold, and those considered anarchists at best share certain family resemblances. Anarchist positions can be total, dealing with society as a whole and calling for a violent *revolution, or more restrictive in their views, dealing with smaller units or advocating piecemeal change. They also vary from the radical individualism of Max Stirner to the anarchist com- munism of Kropotkin, with the positions of Proudhon, Bakunin, and the anarcho-syndicalists falling in between. Max Stirner (1806–56) is the most individualistic and ‘egoistic’ of the anarchist thinkers. For him the freedom of the individual is absolutely sovereign, and any infringe- ment on that freedom is unjustifiable. He attacks not only the *State, government, law, and *private property, but also religion, the family, ethics, and love—all of which impose limits on individual action. He does not preclude human interaction but all associations are to be anarchism 31 completely free and individuals enter them only for their own reasons and benefit. Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), another somewhat atypical anarchist, adopted a type of religious anarchism, using the Bible to attack the rule of one person over another and the legitimacy of secular power. He finds in the Gospels a doctrine of peace and love that is sufficient for the organization of society and that is violated by governments, laws, police, armies, and private property. Proudhon’s anarchism advocated a society based on small enterprises and skilled craftsmen who organized to form a co-operative community of equals. Michael Bakunin (1814–76), who favoured violent over- throw of the state, envisaged replacing it with a federation built from below on the basis of voluntary associations. Anarcho-syndicalism focused on trade unions, or syndicates, as the engine of change in society, for syndicates championed the interests of the workers and could serve as the basis for social organization after a successful revolution had overthrown the existing state structures. Peter Kropotkin (1842– 1921), as an anarcho-communist, held that the individual is essentially a social being who can fully develop only in a communist-type society, which precluded authoritarian rule and the special interests of dominant groups. Like other communists he advocated the abolition of private property and the development of a society built on common ownership of the means of production. For him the commune is the basic social unit, and communal needs are balanced with individual needs. Despite their differences the proponents of anarchism generally tend to: (1) affirm freedom as a basic value; some add other values as well, such as justice, equality, or human well-being; (2) attack the state as inconsistent with freedom (and/or the other values); and (3) propose a programme for building a better society without the state. Most of the literature on anarchism considers the state an instrument of oppression, typically run by its leaders for their own benefit. Government is often, though not always, similarly attacked, as are exploitative owners of the means of production in a capitalistic system, despotic teachers, and over-dominant parents. By extension anarchists hold as unjustifiable any form of authoritarianism, which is the use of one’s position of power for one’s own benefit rather than for the benefit of those subject to authority. The anarchist emphasis on *freedom, *justice, and human *well-being springs from a positive view of human nature. Human beings are seen as for the most part capable of rationally governing themselves in a peace- ful, co-operative, and productive manner. Whereas the traditional role of the political theorist is to justify the existing structures of society, the role of the anarchist is to challenge these structures and to demand their justification prior to accepting them. In accord with the anarchists’ view of the state as an instrument of oppression in the hands of a ruling class, they see law as simply the means by which that class defends its self- interest, and armies and police as the means the rulers use to enforce their will. The state so conceived has injustice built into it and hence is in principle unjustifiable. More- over, the state is the major perpetrator of violence, and the cause of much of the oppression, social disorder, and other ills suffered by society. The anarchists differ on how to rid society of the state, violent revolution being the most drastic, and piecemeal change from below, often through education, the least radical. The good society which forms part of the positive anarchist project is similarly an issue on which there is considerable disagreement. But most advocates of anarchism envisage a society to which the members voluntar- ily belong, which they are able to leave if they wish, and in which the members agree to the rules under which they live. Size and levels of complexity are not major issues, although the emphasis is usually on beginning with smaller units of self-determination and building on those. Thus, anarchism does not preclude social organization, social order or rules, the appropriate delegation of authority, or even of certain forms of government, as long as this is distinguished from the state and as long as it is adminis- trative and not oppressive, coercive, or bureaucratic. Anarchism maintains that all those who hold authority should exercise it for the benefit of those below them, and if they hold offices of authority they are accountable to those below them and recallable by them. The abolition of the state precludes not the organization of things but the domination of people. Most, though not all, anarchists acknowledge the importance of the moral law as the proper guide for social interaction, providing this is envisaged as compatible with the autonomy of the individual. Most anarchists accept a kind of democracy in which people are self-governed at all levels. The details of social organization are not to be set out in advance but are in part to be decided by those who are subject to them. Although anarchists were politically active in Spain, Italy, Belgium, and France especially in the 1870s and in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and although anarchists formed an anarcho-syndicalist union in the United States in 1905, there have been no significant, successful anarchist communities of any size. Anarchism enjoyed a renaissance for a period in the 1960s and early 1970s in the writings of such proponents as Paul Goodman (1911–72), perhaps best known for his writings on education, and Daniel Guérin (1904–88), who develops a communitarian type of anarchism that builds on but goes beyond nineteenth-century anarcho- syndicalism, which is now out of date. As a political theory anarchism is not at present widely held; but it continues to serve as an important basis for the critique of authoritarianism and as a continuing reminder of the need to justify existing institutions. r.de g. D. Guérin, Anarchism, tr. Mary Klopper (New York, 1970). J. Joll, The Anarchists, 2nd edn. (London, 1979). G. Woodcock, Anarchism (Harmondsworth, 1986). Anaxagoras (500–428 bc). *Pre-Socratic philosopher. A native of Clazomenae in Asia Minor, he lived most of his life at Athens, where he was a friend of the democratic 32 anarchism statesman Pericles. Rather unreliable sources say that he was ultimately exiled from Athens after a prosecution for impiety (his statement that the sun was a large lump of metal was allegedly the basis of the charge). Like his contemporaries the early Atomists (Leucippus and Democritus), Anaxagoras re-thought the Milesian cosmological enterprise in the light of Eleatic methods and arguments, but without any wholesale acceptance of them. On two cardinal points Anaxagoras went the opposite way to Atomism. (1) He postulated a material continuum (without void) with infinitely complex micro-structure. There were infinitely many fundamental kinds of matter, not further reducible and not interchangeable. All of these kinds of matter were present in every spatially continuous portion of matter, however small. Hence there were no places in which any type of matter existed unmixed with all the others. There was ‘a portion of everything in everything’. This was in effect a ‘field theory’ (as opposed to the Atomists’ ‘particle theory’), exploiting the possibilities of arbitrarily small scales of size. The details are obscure and controversial. (2) His universe was dominated by teleology. The ordering of things was planned and initiated by Mind (Nous), which was conceived of both as a unified cosmic intelligence and as an explanation of human and animal intelligence. Both Plato and Aristotle praised Anaxagoras for his explicit assertion of the rule of Mind (Aristotle said ‘he showed up like a sober man, as compared with his wild-talking predecessors’), but both com- plained that he gave only mechanistic explanations of particular phenomena. e.l.h. *atomism, physical; teleological explanation. M. Schofield, An Essay on Anaxagoras (Cambridge, 1980). Anaximander of Miletus ( fl.c.550 bc). Associate of Thales and one of the three Milesian ‘natural philosophers’. (*Pre-Socratic philosophy.) His monistic cosmology was based on the self-transformations of ‘the Infinite’, an infinitely extended being, living and intelligent. In his explanations, biological and legal analogies are used, and there is a striking appeal to symmetry (the earth stays at rest because it is symmetrically placed in the cosmos; so there is no reason why it should move in one direction rather than another). e.l.h. C. H. Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (New York, 1960). Anaximenes of Miletus ( fl. c.550 bc). The third of the troika of Milesian ‘natural philosophers’ (*Pre-Socratic philosophy). He proposed a cosmological theory in which the whole of the universe consisted of air in different degrees of density—the first attested attempt to explain qualitative differences in terms of quantitative ones, and one backed up by an appeal to everyday experience (air breathed from an open mouth feels warm, air breathed through pursed lips feels cold). e.l.h. J. Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, i (London, 1979), 38–47. ancestral relation. A relation obtained through the following logical transformation of a given relation: The ancestral of a relation R holds between objects x and y if and only if either x bears Rtoy, or x bears Rto some z 1 that itself bears R to y, or x bears R to some z 2 that bears R to a z 1 that bears R to y, or . . . Thus, ‘ancestor’ is the ancestral of ‘parent’, and ‘less than’ (restricted to natural numbers) is the ancestral of ‘immediate predecessor’. Frege showed that the ancestral of a *relation can be explicitly defined, without ellipsis, within second-order logic. a.gup. G. Boolos, ‘Reading the Begriffsschrift’, Mind (1985). ancient philosophy. ‘Ancient philosophy’ is the conventional title, in Europe and the English-speaking academy, for the philosophical activities of the thinkers of the Graeco-Roman world. It includes a succession of philosophers who operated over a 1,000-year period from the middle of the first millennium bc to the middle of the first millennium ad—from Thales and the earliest Pre- Socratics to late Neoplatonists and Aristotelian commen- tators, such as Simplicius and Philoponus. Later thinkers in Europe (e.g. Scotus Eriugena) are normally assigned to the category *‘medieval’, as are Arabic philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroës, and also Jewish philosophers such as Gabriol and Maimonides. Contemporary philosophers from other cultures (e.g. Confucius, Buddha) are also not included. Traditionally ancient philosophy is divided into four main periods: the *Pre-Socratic philosophers, Plato, Aris- totle, the post-Aristotelian philosophers. Recently there has been a tendency to divide the last by adding a fifth phase of Christian and Neo-platonist philosophers. The most important of the ancient philosophers are Plato and Aristotle; and even though there has been a considerable shift of interest in the past thirty years in favour of the post- Aristotelians, it remains the case that the two fourth- century bc philosophers are the primary focus of interest, both to specialists and to students and the wider philosophical community. This is partly because their writings survive in extensive and accessible form, so that they can be studied and assessed for the quality of their argumenta- tion as well as for their conclusions; it is also a recognition of the superior nature of their philosophical work. In their different ways Plato and Aristotle look both backwards and forwards in philosophy. Each constructs his theorizing so as to encapsulate leading elements in the earlier tradition: Plato does this with impressionistic flair, Aristotle perhaps with more precision and historical accur- acy. This retrospective work is intended to supersede the insights of preceding philosophers; and it largely succeeds in this. Thus the available options in ontology are summar- ized in Plato’s Sophist as monism, dualism, or pluralism, and a commitment to the primacy either of perceptible body or of intelligible ideas. Aristotle discovers in earlier thought confused but recoverable traces of four distinct kinds of explanation, which correspond to his four kinds of cause—material, formal, efficient, and final. In these and ancient philosophy 33 many other ways Plato and Aristotle absorb what is philo- sophically valuable in Pre-Socratic thought, and they transmute it into something which has endured with greater vitality in the later philosophical tradition. None the less, there are certain Pre-Socratic themes which Plato and Aristotle undervalue and which have been emphasized by contemporary philosophers. Heracli- tus and Parmenides, in particular, were clearly very much concerned with the relations between language and thought and the world. Philosophers in the contemporary hermeneutical tradition (but also many others before them) have been interested in Parmenides’ comments on the limits of the expressible; and Marxists and paraconsist- ent logicians have sought to develop Heraclitus’ aph- orisms on the contradictoriness of truth. Empedocles and Anaxagoras are scrutinized to see how they connected chemical analysis with mental causation. While the concerns of Plato and Aristotle also exert great influence on the work of post-Aristotelian philosophers, these latter also develop a number of new themes. For example, there were substantial advances in proposi- tional and modal logic, in speculation about the natural basis of epistemology, and in the philosophies of physics and of law. They also supplied important clarification of the philosophical issues involved in the debate over deter- minism and freedom. In ethics they were concerned with appropriate attitudes to animal suffering and to human death, in ways which anticipate recent themes in applied philosophy. What are the main features of ancient philosophy? This 1,000-year period of Graeco-Roman philosophy has bequeathed certain central themes for later thinkers. It is incumbent on all philosophers to be aware of the precise way in which these problems were introduced into the subject, even though the later course of debate may have injected new directions or emphases. The key themes are these: the ontological specification of non-perceptible items (e.g. numbers, gods, universal kinds); the isolation of objective causes in the non-animate sphere of nature; the analysis and evaluation of patterns of reasoning and argument; the importance of understanding in the pursuit of the good life; the need to analyse the nature of the human person; the importance of the concept of justice in defining the nature of a political system; critical self- awareness regarding the content and manner of philosophical utterance; and many more. The ancient philosophers created and laid much of the groundwork for later philosophical debate in the fields of ontology, epistemology, logic, hermeneutics, ethics, and political philosophy. They also established the crucial features of philosophical method—open-mindedness as to the agenda of problems, and rational progress through argument and debate. While much of ancient philosophy runs with common sense, it also contains paradoxes and eccentricities. Among these are to be counted Plato’s theory of Forms, according to which universal kinds or properties are actually separate from their instances, Aristotle’s conception of God as concerned only with his own essence, and the Stoics’ absolutist distinctions between good and bad. Some themes are prominent in ancient philosophy which have become less so in the more recent history of the subject, while in the case of others it has been claimed that they were unknown or ignored by the ancient thinkers and only came to the fore in philosophy in the period since Descartes. Examples of the former are the significance of form in relation to the stuff of which a thing is made, and the idea that the most effective strategy for explaining natural change is through end-results (teleology). On the other hand, the modern philosophical themes of personal identity, the distinction between mind and body, and the contrast between first and second-order questions—in ethics and elsewhere—seem to be missing from the agenda of ancient philosophy. But these idiosyn- crasies can be exaggerated. It would be prudent to assume that on these, as on other, topics there will be further research which reopens debate between ancient philosophers and their successors. One of the most fertile fields of ancient philosophy was ethics. Here a central figure is Socrates, whose intellectu- ally profound and persistent interest in the nature of the good life led him to penetrating comment on human knowledge and rationality. The constructive scepticism of Socrates has been a major determinant of subsequent philosophical method. Socrates has always been an emblem of the true philosopher; and this iconic tendency has become more pronounced in recent years. (It is some- times reinforced by the fact that Socrates, who published nothing, could not have been ‘assessed’ by current league table methods). Aristotle’s ethical work was strongly influenced by Socrates. He reacted against Socrates by emphasizing the importance of character and, as such, has inspired a recent revival of what is now called ‘virtue ethics’. His theory of the ethical mean is particularly inter- esting to value-pluralists, who strive to avoid oversimplifi- cation in moral theory. Ancient moral philosophy reinforces the contemporary philosophical interest in applying ethical analysis to real life problems. The ancient philosophers always saw their theoretical interest as directed on practical matters. Their ethics is, therefore, applied as well as being theoretical. A further way in which the habits of ancient philosophical thought connect with modern interests comes from the concept of dialectic. Contemporary philosophers are rediscovering the connection between analytical and dialectical philosophical styles. The roots of both lie in ancient philosophy, whose leading thinkers placed high value both on the pursuit of philosophical dialogue and on the analysis of complex and potentially ambiguous concepts. Philosophers who are concerned with hermeneutics have recently rediscovered the literary complexity of Plato’s compositions; they have found philosophical significance in the ways in which different characters are portrayed as presenting the truth. This method has been applied to some of the most ‘analytical’ of his works, such as Sophist. Attention to the works of the major ancient 34 ancient philosophy plato’s status as the father of Western philosophy is owed not just to the fortunate preservation of his entire œuvre (unusual for an ancient philosopher) but to the exceptional richness, subtlety, breadth, and beauty of his writings. aristotle first came to Plato’s Academy as a teenager, and thirty years later founded a new school in Athens, the Lyceum, where he taught and wrote on all subjects: philosophy, logic, politics, rhetoric, literature, and the sciences. He was still regarded as the authority on these subjects 1,500 years later. epicurus taught that pleasure is the only good, but the life of pleasure that he advocated was a sober one, guided by wisdom. plotinus, probably a Hellenic Egyptian by birth, settled in Rome in middle age, and spent the rest of his life teaching philosophy through informal discussion groups. ancient philosophy thinkers is an excellent antidote to the division of philosophy into sectarian factions which is still urged in some quarters. The study of ancient philosophy is an important elem- ent in philosophy, which needs to be sustained at a level of suitable scholarly rigour. But there is a declining com- plement of qualified specialist academic staff, and a per- sonnel crisis. j.d.g.e. *Aristotelianism; Neoplatonism; Platonism; Roman philosophy; Stoicism; Sceptics, ancient; Epicureanism; footnotes to Plato. The nature of current work in ancient philosophy can be assessed from the following rather different kinds of material: J. Barnes, The Toils of Scepticism (Cambridge, 1990). W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, 6 vols. (Cam- bridge, 1962–81). T. H. Irwin, Aristotle’s First Principles (Oxford, 1988). M. M. McCabe, Plato and his Predecessors (Cambridge, 2000). M. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge, 1986). R. Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals (London, 1993). ancient philosophy, relevance to contemporary philosophy: see footnotes to Plato. and: see conjunction and disjunction. Anderson, John (1893–1962). Anderson had more influence than anyone else on Australian philosophy, and the philosophy he taught was unlike anyone else’s. (Heraclitus and Alexander were influences.) It put everything on one level: no God, no atomic ultimates, no substantival selves; everything just ‘a set of interacting situations’ occupying a region of space and time. Correspondingly, all truth is of one kind: there is no necessary truth; there is just being so. Andersonian realism asserts the independence of knower and known, whatever the known. To regard a relation as at all constitutive of anything is a form of ‘relativistic’ confusion. Anderson is always hunting down relativistic confusion. He finds it, for example, in the obligatory. This is generated when a relation with one term suppressed—a requirer—is seen as a quality—require- ment—of an action. The demolishing questions are: Who does the requiring? and What is his policy? s.a.g. John Anderson, Studies in Empirical Philosophy (Sydney, 1962) includes most of Anderson’s writing. J. L. Mackie, ‘The Philosophy of John Anderson’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy (1962). Anderson and Belnap. Alan Ross Anderson (1925–73) and Nuel D. Belnap, Jr. (b. 1930) came together at Yale Uni- versity in the late 1950s, the former as teacher, the latter as student. Belnap had returned from study in Europe with Robert Feys, who had interested him in Wilhelm Acker- mann’s seminal paper on ‘strenge Implikation’ in the Journal of Symbolic Logic for 1956; Anderson was delighted to find a fellow enthusiast, and between them they began (little knowing what it would become) a programme of research into *‘relevance logic’. Anderson’s other work in modal logic, deontic logic, and philosophy of mind should not be forgotten; nor his dry wit and felicitous style. Equally, remember Belnap’s short but seminal paper on ‘Tonk, Plonk and Plink’ (Analy- sis (1962)) giving the beginnings of an answer to Prior on whether logical connectives can be defined by the infer- ences they make valid; and his work on the logic of questions. Both men have worked effectively in joint research with a range of colleagues. Last but not least, we should not overlook the effect of both men as inspiring teachers, grandfathers of late twentieth-century philosophical logic through the influence of their pupils. s.l.r. A. R. Anderson, N. D. Belnap et al., Entailment: The Logic of Rele- vance and Necessity, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1975, 1992). Angst . A recurrent state of disquiet concerning one’s life which Existentialists interpret as evidence that human life has a dimension which a purely naturalistic psychology cannot comprehend. The term was introduced by Kierkegaard, who held that Angst (usually translated here as ‘dread’) concerning the contingencies of fortune should show us that we can only gain a secure sense of our identity by taking the leap of faith and entering into a relationship with God. Heidegger uses the same term (here usually translated as ‘anxiety’) to describe a sense of unease concerning the structure of one’s life which, because it does not arise from any specific threat, is to be diagnosed as a manifestation of our own responsibility for this structure. Sartre uses the term angoisse (usually translated as ‘anguish’) for much the same phenomenon as Heidegger describes. t.r.b. *existentialism; despair. M. Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. J. MacQuarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford, 1962), sects. 40, 53. animal consciousness. Whether animals have consciousness is a question that naturally arises in modern philosophy, which has been dominated in one way or another by Cartesian dualism. In my own case, it is suggested, I know that the bodily movements observed by others are accom- panied by a mental life, that is hidden from them; but when I observe their ‘behaviour’, I can’t be certain that they’ve got minds. Animals (and nowadays computers) appear to generate the same problem, except that denying them consciousness is felt to be less of an outrage to common sense. Animals are of very different kinds, their behaviour varies, and some have lives closely interwoven with ours. Philosophers who treat animal consciousness as problematic are happy to say that their own dogs want taking for walks, or look guilty because they’ve been on the furniture. Descartes himself, however, steadfastly maintained that his dog was merely an elaborate clock-like mechanism. But he didn’t actually take the dog apart to prove this. c.w. M. Bekoff and D. Jamieson (eds.), Readings in Animal Cognition (Cambridge, Mass., 1996). Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part V. 36 ancient philosophy animalism in personal identity. Animalists maintain that a human *person just is (identical with) a living human organism or human animal, in opposition to those philosophers who, because they believe that the persist- ence conditions of persons are psychological rather than biological in character, hold that a person is distinct from his or her living body. In defence of their position, animalists urge the plausibility of the view that I existed, as a human embryo, some weeks before I was the subject of any conscious mental states, and may well go on existing for a time after I cease to be such a subject. Against the animalist, it may be urged that if my intact and functioning brain were to be transplanted into the evacuated cranium of another human animal, I would acquire a new body rather than someone else acquiring a new brain. How- ever, the animalist may perhaps agree, saying that in this case the animal that I am is first reduced to the size of its brain and is then supplied with a new set of body parts. e.j.l. *personal identity. E. Olson, The Human Animal (Cambridge, 1997). animals. In Western ethics, non-human animals were until quite recent times accorded a very low moral status. In the first chapter of Genesis, God gives human beings dominion over the animals. In the Hebrew Bible, this dominion was moderated by some injunctions towards kindness—for example, to rest one’s oxen on the sabbath. The Christian scriptures, however, are devoid of such sug- gestions, and Paul even reinterprets the injunction about resting one’s oxen, insisting that the command is intended only to benefit humans. Augustine followed this interpretation, adding that Jesus caused the Gadarene swine to drown in order to demonstrate that we have no duties to animals. Aquinas denied that we have any duty of charity to animals, adding that the only reason for us to avoid cruelty to them is the risk that cruel habits might carry over into our treatment of human beings. Descartes’s views were even more hostile to animals than those of his Christian predecessors. He regarded them as machines like clocks, which move and emit sounds, but have no feelings. This view was rejected by most philosophers, but Kant went back to a view similar to that of Aquinas when he held that animals, not being rational or autonomous, were not ends in themselves, and so the only reason for being kind to them is to train our dispositions for kindness toward humans. It was not until Bentham that a major figure in Western ethics advocated the direct inclusion of the interests of animals in our ethical thinking. The debate over the moral status of animals remained peripheral to philosophical thinking until the 1970s, when a spate of books and articles led to a vigorous and continuing debate. Peter Singer compared speciesism with racism and sexism, and urged that there is no good reason for refusing to extend the basic principle of equality— the principle of equal consideration of interests—to non-human animals. Singer argued specifically against factory farming and animal experimentation, and urged that, where there are nutritionally adequate alternatives to eating meat, the pleasures of our palate cannot out- weigh the suffering inflicted on animals by the standard procedures of commercial farming; hence *vegetarianism is the only ethically acceptable diet. On animal experimentation, Singer urged that, in considering whether a given experiment is justifiable, we ask ourselves whether we would be prepared to perform it on an orphaned human being at a mental level similar to that of the proposed animal subject. Only if the answer was affirmative could we claim that our readiness to use the animal was not based on a speciesist prejudice against giving the interests of non-human animals a similar weight to the interests of members of our own species. Other contemporary philosophers have reached similar, or even more uncompromising, conclusions on a different philosophical basis. Tom Regan, for example, argued that all animals—or at least mammals above a certain age—are ‘subjects of a life’ and therefore have basic *rights. Eating animals and performing harmful experi- ments on them are, he holds, violations of these rights. In addition to giving rise to a heated philosophical debate, these writings are unique in modern academic philosophy in that they have sparked and continue to influence a popular movement. Major animal liberation and animal rights organizations have developed in many countries, taking their inspiration from the writings of academic philosophers like Singer and Regan, and have made many people more aware of the ethical issues involved in our relations with animals. p.s. Ted Benton, Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights, and Social Justice (London, 1993). R. G. Frey, Interests and Rights: The Case Against Animals (Oxford, 1980). D. Jamieson, Morality’s Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature (Oxford, 2003). Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley, Calif., 1983). —— and Peter Singer (eds.), Animal Rights and Human Obligations (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1989). Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York, 1975; 2nd edn. 1990). animal souls. For Aristotle souls are general modes of functioning. A plant will have a soul because it feeds and reproduces; the soul of an animal will also cover the capacity to move and sense, and that of a person the capacity to think. Descartes substituted the idea of an immaterial *soul whose essence is abstract thought, excluding non- humans. So, he concludes, animals are machines with no feelings. (So for humans but not animals there is a chance of immortality.) But even if there are such souls it does not follow that non-humans do not feel, and thus that they lack souls in Aristotle’s more reasonable sense. a.m. Mary Midgley, Beast and Man (London, 1980). Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 2nd edn. (New York, 1990). animal souls 37 animal spirits. There is nothing spiritual about Descartes’s animal spirits. In Cartesian physiology, they are the purely material medium for the transmission of nervous impulses in humans and animals. ‘All the movements of the muscles and likewise all sensations, depend on the nerves, which are like little threads or tubes coming from the brain, and containing, like the brain itself, a certain very fine air or wind, which is called the “animal spirits” (les esprits animaux)’ (Passions of the Soul (1649), art. 7). For the relationship between these pneumatic events and sensory awareness, Descartes had recourse to the pineal gland. j.cot. John Cottingham, Descartes (Oxford, 1986), ch. 5. anima mundi . Latin for ‘world-soul’, an idea stemming from Plato’s Timaeus, where the world is a living organism, endowed with a soul by the Demiurge. It explains the harmonious celestial motions and is a model for the restoration of harmony in the human soul. The idea was adopted by Stoicism and Plotinus, and later by Bruno, Goethe, Herder, and Schelling. It is akin to the ‘world- spirit’ (e.g. of Hegel), but this is more intellectual and is not (as the world-soul often is) distinct from, and subor- dinate to, God. m.j.i. F. M. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology (London, 1937). F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago, 1964). anomalous monism. The view that the mental and the physical are two irreducibly different ways of describing and explaining the same objects and events. The position, like that of Spinoza, combines ontological *monism with conceptual *dualism. It holds that mental concepts, though supervenient on physical concepts, cannot be fully analysed or defined in physical terms, and claims that there are no strict *psychophysical laws. d.d. *supervenience; identity theory of mind. D. Davidson, ‘Mental Events’, in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1980). anomie. Breakdown of the conventions of everyday life; weakening of a society’s collective self-image or social laws. The term derives from the Greek nomos (strictly, ‘anything assigned or apportioned’, ‘that which one has in use or possession’, but, derivatively, ‘law’, ‘usage’, ‘cus- tom’); so its etymology is suggestive of ‘absence of law’. Anomic terror is the psychological state of individuals stripped of the mores which socially legitimate their death to self and other. *Durkheim argues that suicide rates increase during periods of anomie. The raising of philosophical questions arguably calls into question established world-views and partly deconditions the individual. If so, philosophy is partly conducive to anomie. s.p. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Harmondsworth, 1967). Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, tr. W. D. Halls, ed. Stephen Lukes (London, 1982). Anscombe, G. E. M. (1919–2001). A distinguished pupil of Wittgenstein and one of his literary executors, responsible for editing and translating many of his posthumous publi- cations. Her Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1959) shed light on his first masterpiece. But Elizabeth Anscombe was also, in her own right, one of the most influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. Her 1957 book Intention initiated extensive discussion of inten- tional action and its explanation, and her 1958 essay ‘Mod- ern Moral Philosophy’ reset the agenda for that subject. Her ethical writings, critical of contemporary trends, are informed by dogmatic Catholicism. Her numerous essays on metaphysics and philosophy of mind are critical of empiricism, challenging, for example, received views of causality and of the first-person pronoun. She was a tutor at Oxford, and later a professor at Cambridge, and was married to the philosopher Peter Geach. p.m.s.h. G. E. M. Anscombe, Collected Philosophical Papers, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1981). Anselm of Canterbury, St (1033–1109). Benedictine monk, second Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, and philosophical theologian dubbed ‘the Father of *Scholasti- cism’. Anselm is justly famous for his distinctive method (‘faith seeking understanding’), his ‘*ontological’ argument(s), and his classic articulation of the satisfaction theory of the *atonement. Better suited to philosophy and contemplation than to politics, Anselm possessed a subtlety and originality that rank him among the most penetrating medieval thinkers (along with Augustine, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham) and explain the perennial fascination with his ideas. Like Augustine a Christian Platonist in metaphysics, Anselm centres his proofs of God’s existence around the value theory intuition that something is too good not to be real! In Monologion, he offers *cosmological arguments that the single source of all goods is Good through Itself (per se) and hence supremely good. It exists through itself and is the self-sufficient source of everything else. In Proslogion, Anselm reasons that a being greater than which is inconceivable exists in the intellect because even a fool understands the phrase when he hears it; but if it existed in the intellect alone, a greater could be conceived which existed in reality. This supremely valuable object is essentially whatever it is better to be—other things being equal—than not to be, and so living, wise, powerful, true, just, blessed, immaterial, immutable, eternal, even the paradigm of sensory goods—beauty, harmony, sweet- ness, and pleasing texture! Yet, *God is not compounded from a plurality of excellences, but supremely simple, ‘wholly and uniquely, entirely and solely good’ (omne et unum, totum et solum bonum), a being more delightful than which is inconceivable. Not only is God the efficient cause of the being and well-being of everything else, but also the exemplar of all created natures, whose value depends upon their degree of similarity to the Supreme Good. Hence, it is better to be human than horse, to be horse than wood, even though 38 animal spirits every creature is ‘almost nothing’ in comparison with God. As fundamentally ways of striving into God, created natures have a *teleological structure, a that-for-which- they-were-made (ad quod factum est) and for which their powers were given by God. Anselm explains in De veritate how teleology gives rise to *obligation: since creatures owe their being and well-being to their divine cause, so they owe it to God to praise him by being the most excellent handiwork (truest instances of their kinds) they can. Obstacles aside, non-rational creatures fulfil this obligation and ‘act rightly’ by natural necessity; rational creatures, freely and spontaneously when they exercise their powers of reason and will to conform to God’s purpose in creating them. Thus, the goodness of an individual creature depends upon its natural end (i.e. what sort of imita- tion of divine nature it aims for), and its rightness (in exercising its natural powers to pursue its end). By contrast, God as absolutely independent owes nothing to anything and so has no obligations to creatures. Anselm advertises the optimism of his *ontology in De casu diaboli by arguing that since the Supreme Good and Supreme Being are identical, every being is good and every good a being. Corollary to this, because all genuine (metaphysically basic) powers are given to enable a being to pursue its natural telos and so to be the best being it can, all genuine powers are optimific, essentially aim at goods, while *evils are metaphysically marginalized as merely incidental side-effects of their operation, involving some lack of co-ordination among powers or between them and the surrounding context. Accordingly, divine omnipo- tence properly speaking excludes corruptibility, passibil- ity, or the ‘ability’ to lie, because the latter involve defects and/or powers in other things to obstruct the flourishing of the corruptible, passible, or potential liar. Ultimately, Anselm qualifies the other Augustinian thesis—that evil is a privation of being, the absence of good in something that properly ought to have it (e.g. blindness in normally sighted animals, injustice in humans or angels)—by recog- nizing certain disadvantages (e.g. pain and suffering) as positive beings. Anselm’s innovative *action theory begins teleologic- ally with the observation that rational creatures were made for a happy immortality enjoying God and to that end given the powers of reason to make accurate value judgements and will to love accordingly. While freedom and imputability of choice are essential and permanent features of all rational beings, freedom cannot be defined as the power to sin and the power not to sin because sin is an evil at which no metaphysically basic power can aim. Rather, for Anselm, freedom is the power to preserve *justice for its own sake. Only spontaneous actions that have their source in the agent itself are imputable. Since creatures do not have their natures from themselves but from God, they cannot act spontaneously by the necessity of their natures. To make it possible for them to become just somehow of themselves, God endows them with two motiv- ational drives towards goodness—an affection for the advantageous (affectio commodi) or tendency to will things for the sake of their benefit to the agent itself; and an affection for justice (affectio iustitiae) or tendency to will things because of their own intrinsic value—which they can co- ordinate (by letting the latter temper the former) or not. The good angels, who upheld justice by not willing some advantage possible for them but forbidden by God for that time, can no longer sin by willing more advantage than God wills for them, because God wills their maximum as a reward. Moreover, because they now know (what couldn’t have been predicted apart from experience or revelation) that God punishes sin, willing more happiness than God wills them to will can no longer even appear advantageous. Creatures who sin by willing advantage inordinately lose both uprightness of will and their affection for justice, and hence the ability to temper their pursuit of advantage or to will the best goods. Anselm holds that it would be unjust to restore justice to angels who desert it. But animality both makes human nature weaker and opens the possibility of redemption. Anselm’s argument for the necessity of the Incarnation plays out the dialectic of justice and mercy featured in Proslogion, chs. 9–11, and characteristic of his prayers. God is the heavenly patron-king, who awards all creatures the status of clients. Justice requires that humans make all of their choices and actions conform to his will. Failure to render what is owed insults God’s honour and makes the offender liable to satisfaction. Since dishonouring God is worse than destroying countless worlds, the satisfaction due for even the smallest sin is incommensurate with any created good. Because it would be maximally indecent for God to overlook such a great offence, and only God can do or be immeasurably deserving, depriving the creature of its honour (through eternal frustration of its end) seems the only way to balance the scales. Yet, justice also forbids that God’s purposes be thwarted through created resistance, while divine mercy destined humans for immortal beatific intimacy with God. Moreover, biological nature (lacked by angels) makes humans come in families, and justice permits an offence by one family member to be compensated by another. Anselm assumes that all actual humans descended from Adam and Eve, and concludes that Adam’s race can make satisfaction for sin, if God becomes a family member and discharges the debt. Anselm’s method reflects his estimate of *human nature and integrates the dynamics of monastic prayer with anticipations of the scholastic quaestio. If human des- tiny is beatific intimacy with God, ante-mortem human vocation is to strive into God with all of our powers—reason as well as emotions and will. Because the subject matter—God—is too difficult for us, permanently partially beyond reach, and because human powers have been damaged by sin, our task presupposes considerable education. The holistic discipline of faith tutors us, training our souls away from ‘stupid’, ‘silly’ questions for right-headed fruitful inquiry. In the intellectual dimension, human duty is not the passive appropriation of authority, but faith seeking to understand what it believes through questions, Anselm of Canterbury, St 39 . structures of society, the role of the anarchist is to challenge these structures and to demand their justification prior to accepting them. In accord with the anarchists’ view of the state as an instrument. exercise it for the benefit of those below them, and if they hold offices of authority they are accountable to those below them and recallable by them. The abolition of the state precludes not the organization. period from the middle of the first millennium bc to the middle of the first millennium ad—from Thales and the earliest Pre- Socratics to late Neoplatonists and Aristotelian commen- tators, such

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