The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 26 potx

somewhat immune.) Rousseau’s work can also be seen as the start of a pervasive interest in the details of child development in educational thought, even if the details of the work of such as Piaget and Kohlberg owe more to the category-based philosophical psychology of Kant than to Rousseau himself. Despite differing radically on the beneficence of an unreformed nature, Plato and Rousseau were at one in seeing education as part of an overarching political and social project. So, indeed, did Dewey, whose philosophy of education combines Rousseauian child-centredness and hostility to traditional learning with a pragmatic socialism. Throughout his long and active life, Dewey was involved with experimental schools and educational reform. He linked meaningful education with the child’s own attempts to solve problems arising from its own funda- mentally social experience. The ‘full meaning’ of studies is secured only when they become ‘integral parts of the child’s conduct and character . . . as organic parts of his present needs and aims—which in turn are social’. Trad- itional education produces only barren symbols and flat residues of real knowledge. In addition it reinforces and perpetuates *élitism and social divisions. The classroom should be ‘a social enterprise in which all individuals have an opportunity to contribute’, in which ‘all are engaged in communal projects’, a sort of democracy in miniature in which the teacher himself is not an ‘external boss or dicta- tor’, imposing curricular standards alien to the pupils’ lives and experiences, but rather the ‘leader of group activ- ities’, who gives the group not ‘cast-iron’ results, but rather starting-points to be developed through the contributions of all involved. Dewey hopes that children will discover everything which it is useful for them to know by working on projects suggested by objects and materials from their everyday life. If this means that they never get round to studying the history and classics prescribed by the traditional curricu- lum, so much the better. Dewey shares Rousseau’s hostil- ity to all that. He is, in addition, Baconian in his hostility to an inner life which is not generally shared and shareable, and also to any form of study not clearly directed to prac- tical problem-solving. There will be little need to emphasize the way in which Dewey’s educational ideas are, like Rousseau’s, live. Dewey reinforces Rousseau’s child-centredness with the Baconian thought that what the child should be centring on are problems and practice. Dewey would obliterate any distinction between training (in what conduces to the pursuit of practical problem-solving) and education (in what it is good to know in and for itself ). Education, in this sense, is a thoroughly classical con- cept, which since the time of Socrates and Aristotle has never entirely disappeared in institutions of learning. Even in medieval times, the minority who studied philoso- phy and theology strove to understand the rationale for what the rest believed, and perhaps only a minority will ever be capable of rationality in that sense. Similarly, even the most Baconian and Deweyesque programmes of study have never succeeded entirely in quenching the desire of some for a more liberal education. Nor has the notion of liberal learning as an end in itself lacked vocal and eloquent defenders, whenever it has been under threat. Thus, in the nineteenth century Matthew Arnold and Cardinal Newman both preached the virtues of an educa- tion in which the pupil would, in Arnold’s words, be inducted into ‘the best that has been thought and said’. Arnold, the school inspector, hoped that a kingdom in which such an education prevailed would be bathed in sweetness and light. His ideas owe something to Schiller, who hoped for a similar result from aesthetic education, and something to Coleridge, who wrote of a non- religious clerisy, an educated élite who would leaven the rest of society. Newman is notable for his insistence on a rounded education, the aim of which was not narrow spe- cialism, but development of the capacity to see all things in relation to each other. Whether Newman thought this was a possibility in schooling prior to the university edu- cation about which he actually wrote is unclear, but the tenor of his thought is undoubtedly in the tradition of Socrates and Aristotle. But does a liberal education of the sort envisaged by Arnold and Newman produce the results they wanted? Can it? As we have already seen, Rousseau and Dewey, in their different ways, argue that an education based on authority and cultural canons may alienate, produce only inert knowledge, and be socially divisive to boot. Nietzsche, too, wrote of the grammar school education from which he profited as producing only pedants and old maids. More radically, in his deconstructive moods, he questioned whether what we claimed to know and value was either true or valuable as opposed to a mask for power relations and (not entirely consistently) whether the scientific quest to discover the truth about nature and ourselves was not, in a deep sense, life-denying. And, today, those who see education in terms of the transmis- sion of the best that has been thought and known are haunted by the image of the Goethe-reading camp commandant and Hitler’s enthusiasm for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. My own feeling is that since Plato philosophers have expected too much and often the wrong things from edu- cation. Education should indeed touch the soul, and turn it, though it is a moot point whether it should turn it inward, as suggested, though in rather different ways, by both Plato and Rousseau. It should involve the formation of habits of behaviour and learning, habits which, contra Rousseau, are not in any obvious sense natural. But even the best moral education cannot guarantee a moral response, nor, contra Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey, an improved society. And the recommendations of Rousseau and Dewey are educationally harmful if they direct educa- tors away from what education can and ought to do: namely to introduce the young to what their elders believe is the best that has been done in the various forms of knowledge and experience that have been developed. 230 education, history of the philosophy of Doing that, even successfully, is no guarantee against wickedness, individual or social. But there are forms of barbarism other than those of the tyrant; and a society which, in the spirit of Bacon and Dewey, makes no dis- tinction between education and training for problem- solving is one. a.o’h. M. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (London, 1869). D. E. Cooper, Authenticity and Learning (London, 1983). J. Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York, 1916). M. Oakeshott, The Voice of Liberal Learning (New Haven, Conn., 1989). A. O’Hear, Education, Society and Human Nature (London, 1981). R. S. Peters, Essays on Educators (London, 1981). education, problems of the philosophy of. An area where philosophical understanding is applied to the illu- mination of issues in education—where this notion covers upbringing within the family as well as learning in schools and other institutions. Systematic studies of this kind began in the USA in the mid-twentieth-century and slightly later in Britain and its commonwealth. To begin with, much work was done on investigating concepts like education, teaching, and indoctrination, on the assump- tion that to be a regular, respectable branch of philosophy like aesthetics or philosophy of religion, philosophy of education required its own puzzling concepts paralleling the concepts of art or god. Over time, however, work on these notions proved to be not so much puzzling as unbearably dull. Most philosophers of education in Britain, Holland, and Canada, as well as in more enlight- ened corners of the USA and Australasia, began to recon- strue their discipline as a form of applied philosophy, whose task is to clarify the aims, content, methods, and distribution of education appropriate to contemporary society. As such, philosophy of education in some ways resembles *medical ethics, which brings moral philoso- phy and philosophy of mind to bear on dilemmas faced by health care professionals. The philosophical horizons of philosophy of education are, however, wider, covering— as we shall see—issues drawn from virtually every area of general philosophy. Hirstian liberal education. A major preoccupation over the past three decades has been with an education, parental or institutional, suitable for a liberal society. Paul Hirst’s early and influential account of liberal education saw it as the development of the student’s rational mind, consisting in an induction into logically distinct patterns of reasoning and imagining found in various ‘forms of knowledge’—mathematics, physical science, human sci- ence, history, philosophy, literature and the fine arts, moral knowledge, and (possibly) religion—each with its own unique concepts and tests for truth. A liberal education in this sense was all about acquiring these forms of knowledge for their own sake—as con- trasted with some extrinsic purpose as when studying physics to become an engineer. The theory was popular with educational reformers up to government level wish- ing to extend to the many the rigorous intellectual educa- tion hitherto enjoyed only by the few. But it ran into difficulties. These were partly specific— about whether, for instance, there are unique concepts in history, or whether literature and the fine arts constitute a form of *knowledge. But there was also a more general problem about why the central aim should be the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Hirst’s Kantian or ‘tran- scendental’ defence, found also in Peters, that one cannot sensibly ask why knowledge should be pursued because the questioner is already committed to its pursuit, proved unconvincing—partly because a sceptical questioner is clearly not so committed. Educational aims in a liberal society. It became clear that one had to start further back than Hirst, with a comprehensive assessment of educational aims. This, in turn, demanded some picture of the kind of society within which these aims would operate. In the last thirty years work on aims and content has usually been conducted within a liberal- democratic framework and has been, and continues to be, strongly influenced by ideas in general philosophy on *liberalism and liberal values. Much of the recent history of philosophy of education can be read as an attempt to formulate a defensible account of an education suitable for a liberal society and to detach this from more problematic versions. Already the Peters–Hirst version of liberal education had drawn the fire of some Marxists and other left-wingers who saw the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake as an ideal suitable only to a leisured élite. Many writers have located a more universally applic- able aim in the cultivation of personal *autonomy. The basic notion here is that everyone should be equipped to determine his or her own major goals in life and not have these paternalistically imposed, whether by custom, par- ents, teachers, or religious and political leaders. This is not, of course, to rule out aims to do with expanding knowledge, since in order to be autonomous one needs a good understanding of options available to one, as well as of the social world within which one chooses one’s goals. But the focus is now less exclusively than with Hirst on the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Quite what the autonomy ideal should include beyond this bare statement has been the topic of much dispute, some invoking the notion of following a life plan, others rejecting this, some putting what others see as excessive weight on rationality, and so on. Personal autonomy has also had to be distinguished from the more general notion of personal well-being. In tradition-directed societies those responsible for children’s upbringing seek to promote their well-being, but hardly their autonomy, given that goals are ascribed by custom and not chosen. The practical import of this is clear as soon as one reflects on the multicultural nature of British or American society and the duties which religions may impose upon parents and communities to bring up their children in values at odds with personal autonomy. Should the liberal state favour aims to do with education, problems of the philosophy of 231 self-determination, or should it be neutral for all but commonly agreed values? Should it prevent parents and non-state schools from bringing children up in non-liberal values? Much will turn in these discussions on how terms like ‘liberal’, ‘autonomy’, and ‘neutrality’ are interpreted. Further issues arise about the nature of personal *well- being. If this is in part to do with the achievement of one’s major goals, then are there limits on what these can con- sist in? An educator will certainly want to rule out goals which harm other people. In general philosophy the claim that personal flourishing necessarily involves altruistic or moral concern has been constantly disputed since Thrasy- machus’ challenge to Socrates in book 1 of *Plato’s Republic. From the educator’s point of view, however, there seems every reason to bring children up to see their own good as inextricably intermeshed with others’. On this view, moral education would not be, as it is often taken to be, a separate area of education. Yet what- ever its status, there are differences in its conception. Commonly it has had to do with bringing about behav- iour in accordance either with moral codes or with higher- order rational moral principles. But recent work on virtue ethics has called this rules-based approach into question, suggesting that we should rather think first of how to bring children up to be kind, courageous, friendly, co-operative, loyal. (*Virtues.) This is a far from being an ivory-tower matter: it has implications, for instance, for the way we think about teacher-training—as well as about parental education and the role of the media in the forma- tion and deformation of character. Another uncertainty over the notion of personal well- being is whether what John Stuart Mill called the ‘higher’ *pleasures—intellectual and aesthetic enjoyments—must form a part of a child’s future goal-structures, or whether, say, a life of well-being could consist wholly in sex, drink- ing Budweiser, watching TV, and playing computer games. Have parents and teachers any responsibility to steer children towards the more exalted alternative, or would the true liberal leave things wholly open? Of course, in promoting autonomy educators will in any case want to open up intellectual and aesthetic activ- ities as possible options, but there may be grounds for them to do more than this. Suppose we take experience of the arts. If the theory is true that this constitutes an autonomous world of its own, so that listening to music is docketed as a leisure pursuit on all fours with pumping iron or bass-fishing, educators may have to be content with the ‘options’ position. But if aesthetic experience has deeper contributions to make to human well-being—as a form of social bonding, for instance, or as a way of pro- moting self-understanding or psychic harmony—parents and teachers may well be justified in encouraging pupils to adopt a way of life in which the arts occupy an important place. (*Aesthetics, problems of.) At the root of many of these issues about personal well- being is the question whether this notion is to be under- stood in terms of the satisfaction of major informed preferences or in some other way. On the preference- satisfaction account, the education system and the market for consumer goods and services, so often seen as at odds over their values, could be seen as working hand in hand, each having the function of revealing and supplying pos- sible intrinsic ends—further study of science, say, in the first case, and personalized number-plates on the other. Another view of personal well-being sees this not as a function of individual desire, but in terms of the attain- ment of such goods as intimacy, self-knowledge, auton- omy, aesthetic activity, physical pleasures—although there are still unresolved issues about whether these goods are derivable in some way from human nature or culturally generated. On the second view of well-being, education has a role distinct from that of the market—in revealing these goods to learners and disposing them to value them. Further work on the aims of education depends on the resolution of this central issue, which has now become a major focus of debate in general ethics. Education and politics. Vocational aims lie outside a Hirst- ian account of liberal education, but other accounts which stress personal autonomy will seek to equip pupils with an understanding of a wide range of vocational as well as non-vocational options. There are also wider issues about what attitudes parents, teachers, and other educators should encourage towards work in general. Is there still room for some version of the traditional ‘work-ethic’, or is this a jettisonable remnant from a more religious culture? What place does work play in personal well-being, intrin- sically as well as instrumentally? Does only ‘meaningful work’ count? Should education be for a Work Society or for an Activity Society? Education for work, in its turn, is inextricable from edu- cation for citizenship, about which there are, again, differ- ent variants, partly depending on one’s view of a liberal society. Leaner ones focus only on the knowledge required for informed political decisions, while others add to this the dispositions, or political virtues, demanded of the citizen. Should the education system have a hand in nurturing such qualities as tolerance, a sense of justice, political courage, and civic friendship? Or when it tran- scends the aim of mere understanding and begins to shape young people’s characters in a certain direction, is it becoming a vehicle of indoctrination? What place among political virtues should there be for attachment to one’s national community? Is education for patriotism at odds with liberal values, since it favours the interests of a particular community rather than those of human beings more generally? Some philosophers have argued that we should think more in terms of education for global citizenship—while others have claimed that patriot- ism is not the same as chauvinism and that imbuing a love of country need not bring with it the idea that that country is somehow superior to others. So much for aims of education, closely intertwined as they are. One task of philosophy of education is to explore interrelationships between them in the interests of a coherent, synoptic, and defensible account. The content 232 education, problems of the philosophy of of aims apart, there is also the question of who should determine them. While some other countries have recently loosened state control in favour of schools and teachers, England and Wales moved in 1988 from profes- sional to political determination of the curriculum. Many of us would applaud political control in principle, holding that there are good reasons for it in the democratic right of every citizen—as distinct from sectional groups like teach- ers or parents—to participate in major decisions shaping the social future. At the same time there are good liberal reasons why teachers should be given considerable auton- omy in implementing these decisions. Political control of aims and curricula should be far from heavy-handed. Whether the detailed, test-led, minutely prescriptive, and incoherent provisions of the 1988 National Curriculum met this requirement is not a matter on which a philoso- pher should pronounce. In 2000 the English and Welsh school curriculum was provided—for the first time in its history, remarkably enough—with an extensive set of general aims. In so far as these are adequate, they provide a touchstone for assessing how much of the traditional content of school education needs to be retained. Is there still a place for religious education? What weight should be placed on acquiring a foreign language? What room is there for contemporary history in schools? Why learn maths? How justified is the traditional weight on theor- etical enquiry as compared with practical activity and rationality? At the more school-focused end of their work, philosophers of education in several countries are now working with policy-makers on questions like these. That the state should play any role in determining the curriculum would be rejected by some libertarian thinkers about education. The content of schooling, like its provision, is, on their view, ideally a matter for the pri- vate sector. Their views overlap with those of some reli- gious thinkers anxious to preserve and enlarge the domain of private faith schools. The assumption in both views is that parents should have the right to determine what the aims and content of their children’s education should be. (We are talking of moral rights. That they have legal rights in many contexts is uncontestable.) This is often asserted, but the grounds for it are dubious. Parents do not own their children, so no right can be based on this. But neither are they in a privileged position to know what is in the best interest of their children, as individuals and as citizens. While parents have rights arising from their responsibil- ities—e.g. the right to exclude a busybody neighbour from interfering with their child’s upbringing—it is not at all clear whether they have any other kind of moral right. Over the last three decades the force of Aristotle’s insistence that education must begin from a political framework has become increasingly evident. Here the dis- tribution of education has been much discussed. Would it be fairer to give all children a common education in the same schools? Or to divide them by school and curriculum according to their IQ, giftedness, specialist talents, par- ents’ religious and other preferences, parents’ ability to pay for private education? To egalitarians, arguments for division often appear flaky rationalizations of an élitist, class-based system. Are intelligence and giftedness, as claimed, largely innate (see below)? What is giftedness, anyway? Is the ‘equality of opportunity’ on which arguments for selection often rely another vehicle of rationalization? Some see a stronger argument for a selective system in the claim that giving able students special provision is in the general interest, since this will help to maximize the benefits they are likely to bestow on society and the econ- omy—or, following *Rawls’s ‘difference principle’, in the claim that this is likely to improve the well-being of the most disadvantaged. Are these arguments more solid? Is there too much obsession with selection, as some would say, at the cost of doing more, and more immediately, for the educationally deprived? Children’s minds and learning. ‘Child-centred’ education can mean different things, including—defensibly—an education which puts children’s flourishing first and school subjects second. It can also refer to a conception of education as a process of biological development akin to the growth of plants or animal bodies. It is doubtful whether the notions of mental or moral development— found, for instance, in theories like Piaget’s—make logical sense. If development is always development towards a biologically given mature state (such as the fully grown tree or human body), it might seem that nothing could count as this in the non-physical areas just mentioned. An assumption in developmentalism, shared with other psy- chological theories applied to education, like those of Chomsky and Skinner, is that learning is a matter of an individual’s causal interactions with the environment, whether or not these are also powered by developmental forces from within. These psychological viewpoints bring us back again to the wider issue of what education is appropriate for a lib- eral society. One conception of this, reflected in the theo- ries just mentioned, starts, as classical liberalism in general started, from a picture of pupils as atomic individuals. On an alternative model, heavily influenced by Wittgenstein- ian arguments against the possibility of private conceptual schemes, learning is essentially a social enterprise, involv- ing the induction of the pupil into publicly agreed rules, practices, and values. This second view lies behind the ‘forms of knowledge’ approach to the curriculum, as well as behind broader and more recent conceptions, in some ways more Deweyan in outlook, stressing induction into a wider range of co-operative social activities and institu- tions, including, as well as intellectual and aesthetic activ- ities, occupations, sports and leisure, family life, and attachments to local or national communities. Whether a liberal account of education can accommo- date these more collective purposes is central to the increasingly embattled debates between liberal and com- munitarian thinkers in the field. If liberalism is tied, as some claim, to atomistic notions of the person, to the hegemony of the free market, and to the privileging of education, problems of the philosophy of 233 egoism over altruism, are its days not rightly numbered? Or are those right who say that a liberal education can encompass and celebrate the idea that individuals are social beings and should cherish their interpersonal attachments, whether at the level of intimate relation- ships or more widely at the level of the nation or other forms of community? Underlying any account of education must lie some kind of conception of *human nature. The relative weight to be placed on biological and on social aspects of this is a central issue in the field. It emerges, for instance, in dis- cussions of whether concepts can be acquired by abstrac- tion from experience—a topic which links Locke directly with the child-centred nursery. It is at the root of contro- versies about the nature of intelligence and the IQ, con- cepts which in their Galtonian form interestingly share the assumption in biological developmentalism that there are ceilings (of the mature tree) beyond which individuals cannot move. The political significance of such an assumption should be plain. If many children possess low intellectual ceilings, there seems a powerful reason for providing them with a different, less demanding form of education than the more able. This is one of the argu- ments for a selective system, already mentioned. But what justification is there for the view that we all have our indi- vidually differing mental ceilings? Is it verifiable? Is it falsi- fiable? Or is it, as some would say, as untestable as beliefs at the heart of other ideological systems, like the belief in the existence of God? More generally, differences over human nature lie behind the broad division among those philosophies of education, often of *Kantian inspiration, like those of Peters and the early Hirst, which see education above all as developing (in the transitive sense) forms of rationality; and those, often influenced by *Aristotle, which, while still attached to rationality, especially practical rationality, pay more attention to the ways in which our biologically given desires and feelings are shaped into virtues, activ- ities, attitudes, and reactions necessary to our flourishing. (Hirst, in his more recent writings, has forsaken the first for the second camp.) The topic of the education of *emotion and feeling illus- trates this division. On one view, found in Peters, emotion is a form of passivity which can obstruct the rational life: children need to learn how to control and canalize it and bring it under the sway of reason. On another, emotions have also a more positive, active role, fear, anger, and sympathy, for instance, being the bases of children’s acquisition of the virtues of courage, self-control, and altruistic virtues like friendliness and benevolence. The educative role of the arts, especially literature, in such a refinement of the emotions brings us back to the place of aesthetic activities in the good life and the liberal curriculum. These are some of the ways in which philosophers have investigated children’s minds. Another area of interest has been in thinking skills. Governments across the world have recently promoted these in school curricula, often in the belief that teaching generalizable skills of logical, creative, and critical thinking is an antidote to the regime of fact learning and rote recall which plagues educational systems from Nanjing to Nantucket. But do general think- ing skills exist? In what way can the critical thinking developed in history lessons be transferred to the math- ematics classroom? Are there logically different kinds of imagining and reasoning found in epistemologically dif- ferent areas—a claim we saw embedded in the Hirstian form of liberal education? There is much in this brief account which has had to be omitted—work, for instance, on the cultivation of the imagination, higher education, lifelong learning, the nature of mathematical education, the teaching of history, the Internet, and a host of other specific topics—to say nothing of more grandiose abstract inquiries into the challenges and perils of something called *post-modernism. j.p.w. *teaching philosophy. E. Callan, Creating Citizens (Oxford, 1997). D. E. Cooper (ed.), Education, Values and Mind (London, 1986). D. W. Hamlyn, Experience and the Growth of Understanding (London, 1978). P. Hirst, Knowledge and the Curriculum (London, 1974). J. Kleinig, Philosophical Issues in Education (London, 1982). R. S. Peters (ed.), The Philosophy of Education(Oxford, 1973). K. Strike, Liberty and Learning (Oxford, 1982). J. White, The Child’s Mind (London, 2002). Edwards, Jonathan (1703–58). Perhaps the foremost of Puritan theologians and philosophers, Edwards, after graduating from Yale in 1720, held a series of pastorates and ministerial posts in the American colonies. This left him time to compose the writings in which he system- atizes and justifies the Puritan theme of the utter depend- ence of humanity and nature on God. Edwards argues from the unthinkability of the notion of absolute nothingness to the eternal existence of being; this necessary eternal being must be infinite and omnipresent and cannot be solid. It can only be space, or God. Furthermore, consciousness and being are the same since it is unthinkable that something could exist from all eternity and nothing be conscious of it. There is another route to this same idealistic conclu- sion. Edwards agrees with the view often attributed to Locke that secondary qualities such as colour and taste exist not in objects but in the mind. But Edwards holds that *primary qualities have a similar existence: solidity is just resistance, shape is the termination of resistance, and motion is the communication of resistance from space to space. Yet ‘resistance is nothing else but the actual exer- tion of God’s power’; so resistance exists in God’s mind and ‘the world is therefore an ideal one’, existing in God’s mind through his free act of creation and in our minds through God’s communicating it to us in a series of regu- lar ideas. These claims, reminiscent of Berkeley, were probably arrived at without any knowledge of Berkeley’s reasoning. 234 education, problems of the philosophy of As the world is entirely dependent on God’s continued creation of it, so our wills are entirely dependent on the causes that God has predestined for them. The Arminians of Edwards’s time believed that human choices were spontaneous and self-determined. This violates the prin- ciple of universal causality that Edwards took from New- ton; thus an act of will is determined by its strongest motives. Further, to say that in a *free act a free choice determines the will involves an infinite regress, for on this characterization that free choice must be determined by a prior free choice, and so on. The solution is to deny any meaningfulness to talk of a free will—rather freedom is something that belongs to a person when not hindered in doing what one wills. How one comes to perform this act of willing has no bearing on its freedom; thus Edwards can hold that choices can be entirely predestined by God and nevertheless that an agent not prevented from carrying them out is free. Indeed Edwards can reconcile freedom not only with *Calvinism but with Newtonian science, which sees nature as entirely determined. Moral judgements are based on sentiment and not on reason: by a sense of beauty one perceives the beauty of heart, or virtuous motive, in a virtuous act. There are two kinds of *beauty—there is benevolence or love of being in general, which is the only true, spiritual, or divine beauty, and which is relished by a divine sense activated by God only in the few he has elected to heaven. The other kind of beauty consists in harmony, proportion, and uni- formity in variety; this is a secondary, natural, inferior beauty perceived by a natural sense. Although nothing is approved by the one sense not approved by the other, true virtue consists in acting according to the former beauty. Only the saint whose inner motives have been entirely changed by God is capable of acting without the taint of self-love found even in the most just or altruistic but non- saintly individuals. Once again Edwards unifies his reli- gious commitments with secular thought: an ethics of sainthood is reconciled with an account of ordinary ethical belief. c.c. Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’ Moral Thought in its British Context (Chapel Hill, NC, 1981). Sang Hyun Lee, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Princeton, NJ, 1988). John E. Smith, Jonathan Edwards: Puritan, Preacher, Philosopher (Notre Dame, Ind., 1993). Edwards, Paul (1923– ). American philosopher who is mixed one part analytic philosopher to one part *philosophe. Although Edwards is best known as the edi- tor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (8 vols., 1967), a massive Enlightenment work with a notable analytic sensibility, his own widely discussed work focuses on such traditional philosophical issues as God, free will, immor- tality, induction, and the nature of value-judgements. Articles and books by him include: ‘Bertrand Russell’s Doubts about Induction’ (1949), The Logic of Moral Discourse (1955), ‘Hard and Soft Determinism’ (1958), ‘The Cosmological Argument’ (1959), ‘Atheism’ (1967), Buber and Buberism (1970), Heidegger on Death (1979), ‘The Case against Reincarnation’ (1986–7, in four parts), Voltaire (1989), and Immortality (1992). A deep respect for science and common sense mark Edwards’s writings, and he is well known for his use of humour as a lethal weapon against philosophers whom he regards as pompous pur- veyors of platitudes, especially Heidegger and Tillich. m.w. *capital punishment; God and the philosophers. ‘Heidegger’s Quest for Being’, Philosophy (1989) captures the distinctive flavour of Edwards’s work. effect: see causality. egalitarianism: see equality; inequality; justice; liberty and equality; socialism; well-being. ego. What ‘I’ stands for, the subject’s essence. Plato and Descartes thought a person could exist disembodied. Locke imagined that a prince could swap bodies with a cobbler. It is hard to see how these stories could be intelli- gible (not to say true) without conceding the existence of an incorporeal ego, a subject for thinking, feeling, and willing, which makes each person who they are. But Hume sought in vain to observe his core *self, and contem- poraries who share Hobbes’s hostility to mysterious non- physical substances wonder whether the stories make sense after all! It needs to be explained, however, why ghost stories at least seem to make sense for people, whereas we can make nothing of disembodied trees, and the thought that the Lada should swap identities with the Mercedes Benz (there being no physical change) strikes us immediately as absurd. j.e.r.s. J. Glover, I: The Philosophy and Psychology of Personal Identity (Harmondsworth, 1988). egocentric particulars. The referents of some words— notably pronouns and demonstrative expressions like ‘this’, ‘here’, and ‘now’—depend in a systematic way on who utters them, when, where, and with what pointing gestures or referential intentions. The particulars (people, objects, events, places, times) thus referred to have been described as ‘egocentric’ (in a purely logical sense of the word, i.e. context-dependent). l.f.s. *contextual definition. B. Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (London, 1940), ch. 7. egocentric predicament. This name was given by Ralph Barton Perry to Berkeley’s argument that anything sup- posed by an opponent of *idealism to be a thing ‘without the mind’ is, by virtue of that supposition, just another idea ‘within the mind’ whose *esse est percipi. Berkeley believed, in Perry’s words, that ‘One cannot conceive things to exist apart from consciousness because to con- ceive is ipso facto to bring within consciousness.’ The egocentric predicament 235 predicament, Perry says, does nothing to prove there are no things without the mind, which is what Berkeley was trying to prove in setting up the argument. Neither the idealist nor the realist can use this predicament to prove his point about unperceived objects. l.w.b. Ralph Barton Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies (New York, 1925), 129ff. egoism, psychological. The theory that all human actions are motivated by self-interest. Taken as a factual claim based on observation, this is obviously false: people are often motivated by emotions like anger, love, or fear, by altruism or pride, by the desire for knowledge or the hatred of injustice. However, egoism can seem true on the basis of a general argument which shows that all these apparently distinct motives, if properly analysed, are really examples of self-interest after all—that any motive must be. The argument is that every voluntary act is something the person on balance wants to do, something he does because he desires to do it; therefore, he does it in order to satisfy his desire to do it; therefore, the act is really self-interested. Even if it seems to sacrifice the person’s interests, its aim is to satisfy his predominant desires. This argument has several things wrong with it. First, as Joseph Butler pointed out, the motive of self-interest would have nothing to aim at unless the person had other motives as well. For example, if you are hungry it is in your interest to eat. But hunger is a desire whose object is eating, and not your interests. Self-interest is a different, second-order desire that has as its object the satisfaction of other, first-order desires, like hunger, which also motivate us directly. And some first-order desires are for things quite apart from oneself. If you donate money to famine relief, your motive is that you don’t want other people to starve; your motive is not that you want to satisfy your desire that other people not starve. You may feel good if you donate the money and bad if you don’t, but that’s because you already think there’s a reason to donate: the feelings don’t explain the motive, rather the motive explains the feelings. Another problem with the argument is that it considers only the influence of present desires on choice. But even if an act aimed at the greatest possible satisfaction of present desires, that would not make it self-interested, because a self-interested action must take into account all one’s interests, future as well as present. So if someone refuses a cholera inoculation during an epidemic, out of fear of the needle, and later contracts cholera, the refusal may have satisfied his strongest desire at the time, but it was not self- interested. Psychological egoism should not be confused with ethical egoism, the view that each person ought to do what will best advance his own interests. t.n. *Mandeville. F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies, essay vii: ‘Selfishness and Self- Sacrifice’. Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons, esp. 11 and 12: ‘On the Love of our Neighbor’. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, app. ii: ‘Of Self-Love’. egoism and altruism. Does morality require a person to act for the good of others, or can its requirements be con- sistently seen as means to self-fulfilment for the moral agent? If the latter, some egoists will argue that only the thought of benefit or gratification to myself can in any case motivate me to action (*egoism psychological); others, ‘ethical egoists’, claim that although I could aim at the good of another, the moral life is in fact the life that maxi- mizes good-for-me, if not always in the shorter term, then reliably over a lifetime. It is a highly challengeable— indeed unconvincing—claim: situations arise, e.g. when some virtually undetectable injustice offers a person great reward and no deterrents. On such a theory, not even con- science would deter. Central to the very notion of a moral imperative is the idea that it has authority to override all other considerations, self-interest notably among them, and to rule out the thought of calculating and quantifying the balance for and against advantage to self on particular occasions of moral obligation. Again, if as an egoist I pro- pose an ethical theory that everyone should understand the object of moral endeavour to be the pursuit of his or her individ- ual good, the proposing of such a universal policy must itself conflict with my own pursuit of my individual good. I cannot really want others to attend to their good, as dis- tinct from my own! But if I simply assert, as a personal manifesto (or, indeed, write it secretly in my diary), ‘I am going to pursue my own fulfilment only, and I understand morality as precisely a means to that’—then I achieve con- sistency—but express no public moral theory. It is not true that everything we can be said to ‘want’ or ‘desire’ is an enhancement or fulfilment of the self. We may want to give way to irrational rage or to wayward sex- ual desire, to hurt another or indeed to help another— without manifesting ‘self-love’ in any of these instances. My rage or aggression may in fact be self-destructive. The beginning of altruism is the realization that not all good and bad are good-for-me and bad-for-me: that certain others—my close friends, say—have joys and sufferings dis- tinct from mine, but for which I have a sympathetic concern—and for their sake, not my own. I may then acknowledge that others beyond the small circle of my friends are not fundamentally different—and so reach the belief that there are objective goods and bads as such. As one self among the others I cannot claim special privileges simply for being the individual that I am! If it is neither impossible nor irrational to act simply for the sake of another, the occurrence of satisfaction or ‘good con- science’ when we have done so is not sufficient ground for the egoist to claim that it was only for these ‘rewards’ that the acts were performed. Nor on the other hand does the possibility of altruism mean that it is a constant moral necessity: an altruist can allow that in most circumstances I can act far more effect- ively on my own behalf than can any other person. A sim- ple but crucial step separates a broken-backed ethical 236 egocentric predicament egoism from a minimally acceptable and consistent moral theory. It involves the recognition of others as more than instrumental to my fulfilment. I may promote my own interests and personal fulfilment, so long as I do not encroach upon the pursuit by others of their fulfilment. That is to recognize other persons as limits to my action: altruism may, of course, go beyond that in seeking posi- tively to advance their good. r.w.h. D. P. Gauthier (ed.), Morality and Rational Self-Interest (Princeton, NJ, 1970). J. Hospers, Human Conduct (London, 1961). eidetic imagery. Enjoyed by those who can imagine or recall something as if it were in front of their eyes. Unlike hallucinators, they remain in control of what they ‘see’, even (as in the extraordinary case reported by Luria) to the extent of improving the lighting! The philosophical chal- lenge is that an inner-perception story looks unavoidable, despite threatened regressive and sceptical arguments that have made imagist accounts of ordinary perception unpopular. j.e.r.s. *image; perception. A. R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist (New York, 1968). eidetic reduction: see Husserl. Eightfold Path: see Buddhist philosophy. Einfühlung : see empathy. Einstein, Albert (1879–1955). German physicist most famous for founding relativity theory on the basis of two simple, empirically well-confirmed principles: that the laws of physics should be the same for all observers regardless of their state of motion, and that all such observers will measure the speed of light to be the same. As a consequence of these principles, he dramatically departed from traditional conceptions of substance and time by proving the equivalence of mass and energy, E = mc 2 , and deducing that the spatio-temporal coordi- nates used by two observers in relative motion to express the laws of physics must be related so that their judge- ments differ over which events occur simultaneously. Ein- stein is also remembered for his opposition to the orthodox interpretation of *quantum mechanics— though his oft-quoted quip ‘God does not play with dice’ does little justice to his other main criticism that the inter- pretation fails to deliver a determinate, measurement- independent description of physical reality. Among Einstein’s numerous other contributions to physics, two stand out: his hypothesis that light is composed of tiny dis- crete packets of energy called photons (for which he officially won his Nobel Prize); and his analysis of the curved trajectory of a body under gravity as, in fact, ‘straight line’ motion occurring in a curved *space-time that has a shape fashioned by the distribution of matter within it. r.cli. *determinism. A. Pais, ‘Subtle is the Lord . . . ’: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein (Oxford, 1982). Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen paradox. In general, quantum mechanics (QM) provides only probabilistic information about the possible results of measurements. The question arises whether this is because the world is genuinely indeterministic and, prior to measurement, the physical system measured does not possess determinate properties corresponding to the measurement outcomes, or whether it is because QM gives an incomplete description of a fully deterministic world. Might the QM description of a system be supplemented, so that the augmented description fully determines the results of measurements? In 1935, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen argued that QM is incomplete. They considered a system of two spatially separated particles, A and B, in a particular quantum state, Ψ. Ψ does not determine the results of measuring the pos- itions of A and B but, given the result obtained on measuring A’s position, it does allow one to predict B’s position with certainty. It therefore seems that B has a determinate pos- ition immediately after A’s position is measured. But because A and B are spatially separated, B’s position can- not be made determinate as a result of the measurement of A’s position without there being some sort of ‘action at a distance’. In order to uphold a principle of locality (that there can be no action at a distance), EPR conclude that B must have had a determinate position all along and that QM is thus incomplete. However, *Bell’s theorem shows that regarding QM as incomplete is not sufficient to save locality. o.p. *quantum theory and philosophy. A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen, ‘Can Quantum-mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?’, Physical Review (1935). A. Fine, The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism and the Quantum Theory, 2nd edn. (Chicago, 1996). élan vital. The key concept in the theory of ‘creative evo- lution’ proposed by the French philosopher Henri Berg- son (1859–1941). Much influenced by Darwin and (even more) by Herbert Spencer, Bergson nevertheless felt that a purely materialistic approach to *evolution is unable to capture both the origination of new complex organs and the general rise of life up the order of being. He therefore argued that there is a kind of vital spirit (élan vital) which powers organic evolution. Bergson denied that he was painting an end-directed picture; but, as in such pictures, Bergson’s scheme left humans in a familiar place, namely at the top. m.r. H. Bergson, L’Évolution créatrice (Paris, 1907); tr. as Creative Evolution (London, 1911). Eleatics. A collective name for three philosophers active in the early to mid-fifth century bc: Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, and Melissus; after Elea (now Velia) in Southern Italy, the native city of the first two. Nothing is known of Eleatics 237 any other philosophers who may have been active at Elea or shared the Eleatic approach (but Plato, Sophist 242c–d suggests there may have been some), apart from the Sophist Gorgias (see below), and, according to a dubious tradition, Xenophanes. There is no evidence of any formal ‘school’, nor even of personal contact between Melissus and the other two. Grouping the Eleatics together is justi- fied by the similarities of method, arguments, and results found in the extant remains of their writings and in other testimony. (For individual details: *Parmenides; *Zeno of Elea; *Melissus.) Common to the Eleatics was a rejection of sense experience as a way to truth, and the acceptance of mathematical standards of clarity and necessity in argu- ment. Parmenides and Melissus claimed to start from pre- misses indubitable to reason, and to argue deductively from these. Zeno, with destructive intent, took only the premisses of opponents and claimed to deduce contradic- tions from them. His weapon, frequently used by the others too, is reductio ad absurdum of the contrary thesis. The influence of the Eleatics was immediate, deep, and lasting. They raised the standards of reasoning all round, and intensified the demand for sharply defined objects of knowledge. Both the later Pre-Socratics and Aristotle, who rejected their conclusions, took their arguments seri- ously, and were driven to take up positions on the meta- physical questions they raised. Gorgias (one of the *Sophists) argued in Eleatic style to sceptical conclusions in his work ‘On Nature or What Is Not’. Plato’s acknow- ledgement to them is made in his scene-setting in the Parmenides and in the role of the ‘Eleatic Stranger’ in the Sophist and Politicus. Most subsequent philosophical analysis in the ancient period, particularly of logical and mathematical concepts, is ultimately indebted to their techniques and insights. e.l.h. J. Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, i (London, 1979), chs. 9–14. elenchus. A Greek word, signifying questioning someone with a view to testing or examining the cogency or cred- ibility of what they have said. Such questioning was wholly central to Socrates’ method of examining the ideas of others, as depicted in Plato’s early dialogues (such as the Protagoras). In his hands, this examination was almost always intended to show up confusions, inconsistencies, or other flaws in his opponents’ positions, so elenchus came to signify a refutation or disproval of some point of view. Accompanied by his noted *irony, Socrates’ fond- ness for refuting views won him no friends. n.j.h.d. Richard Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic (Oxford, 1953) is a central text for this. eliminativism. Extreme materialist doctrine advocating the elimination of everyday psychological concepts in favour of neuroscientific ones. The doctrine is sometimes cast in the claim that *folk psychology is false. This seems incredible: if it were correct, then (belief being a state of folk psychology) it could not be true that anyone believed it. The doctrine is usually premissed on (a) a metaphysical thesis purporting to show the need to reduce common- sense categories to categories of some mature science (*reductionism), (b) a purported demonstration that our commonsense psychological categories are not such as to match up with those that could be used in any scientific account. j.horn. Paul Churchland, ‘Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes’, Journal of Philosophy (1981). élitism. The belief that in any society there exist or ought to exist groups of those pre-eminent in any given field, including the political. In the Seventh Letter (326a–b) Plato wrote. ‘The human race will not see better days until either the stock of those who rightly and genuinely follow philosophy acquire political authority, or else the class who have political control be led by some dispensation of providence to become real philosophers.’ Plato thus holds both that it is possible to identify individuals who are by nature or grace specially fitted to rule, and that those so identified should rule. Both tenets will be questioned, the first by those dubious that there is a special identifiable tal- ent for political leadership, and the second by those who want political power diffused rather than concentrated in the hands of a demarcated élite. However, even rule by ‘the people’ in practice often becomes rule by a new polit- ical élite: perhaps the most prudent course is to follow Karl Popper, for whom the most important political question is notwho should rule, but rather how rulers can be regularly and peacefully got rid of by the ruled. Popper’s position tacitly admits the likelihood of political élites and sets about devising the means to control them. While the term ‘élitist’ has lately become a term of abuse, the existence of élites in various areas of life is an inevitable consequence of the unequal distribution of human powers combined with a degree of social mobility and division of labour, which enables some of those who excel in a valued field to devote themselves to the devel- opment of their talent. To object to this in itself seems, as Nietzsche urged, to be little more than a symptom of envy on the part of the untalented. What is more questionable in Nietzsche is the claim that ‘the good of humanity’ lies ‘only in its highest specimens’. If members of élites behave as though they believed Nietzsche, they will doubtless provoke in their fellows expression of the resentful egali- tarianism to which Nietzsche himself took such strong objection. If élitism is, at least on the surface, to be distinguished from egalitarianism, it must also be distinguished from a belief in the virtues of an hereditary class system. Those who owe their position to birth are not necessarily tal- ented in any sphere, and so do not, in the strict sense of the term, count as part of an élite. One of the objections to rule by a political élite chosen because of its members’ admin- istrative or political skills is that such people may have lit- tle sense of the duties which go or ought to go with rule. 238 Eleatics The magnanimity of noblesse oblige often eludes the meri- tocrat, who lacks that sense of responsibility to the under- dog which in good times should be part of the upbringing of the aristocrat. Élitism, then, is one of the marks of that type of classless society in which the talented are allowed to rise from any starting position. A thoroughgoing élitism, indeed, while not ostensibly egalitarian, would have to embody a princi- ple of *equality of opportunity whereby everyone in a soci- ety was free to rise where his or her talents led. In practice, such a principle may lead to a constant levelling-off of out- comes, and to preventing members of élites from giving advantages to their children. Élitism then, if not tempered with a right of parents to give special advantages to their children, will drift towards the very egalitarianism it set out to oppose. There may also be worries about the effect the rapid social mobility implied by a society structured on achievement rather than on class would have on culture and social continuity more generally. a.o’h. *conservatism; inequality; justice; socialism. T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London, 1948). K. Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (London, 1940). V. Pareto, The Mind and Society (London, 1935). Elster, Jon (1940– ). Norwegian social and political theo- rist who has taught in Norway, France, and the United States. In his prolific and lively writings, which focus on social theory and rationality, Elster employs a wide range of conceptual tools drawn from philosophy, logic, game theory, economics, and psychology. His critical examin- ation of Marx’s social theories formed a cornerstone of so-called analytical *Marxism, while his insistence on the need to look for the micro-foundations of social change, together with the light his analyses of problems in theories of rational action throw on the many faces of irrationality, and the role of emotion, have provided a multi- disciplinary resource for the detailed explanation of complex and large-scale social phenomena. a.h. Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge, 1983). embodiment. The doctrine in aesthetics and elsewhere that all and only cultural entities and phenomena (per- sons, artworks, actions) exhibit indissolubly complex properties that are at once material and intentional. The intentional features signify the collective linguistic, semi- otic, and institutional aspects of societal life. On the argu- ment, the mind–body problem proves to be a restricted form of a more general culture–nature problem. The the- sis is taken to provide the minimal metaphysics of the human sciences, the arts, morality, and the like, that is, those inquiries that admit intrinsically interpretable phe- nomena. The admission entails the non-reductive sui generis nature of cultural emergence relative to physical nature. j.m. *intentionality. Joseph Margolis, Art and Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1980). ——Culture and Cultural Entities (Dordrecht, 1984). embraced and reluctant desires. Reluctant desires are those desires we would prefer not to have and act on. Embraced desires are first-order desires, perhaps consti- tuting life-hopes, which we actually desire to have. Reluc- tant desires operate in frustrating or obstructing circumstances (a weary writer’s watching television), embraced desires in satisfying or enabling ones (the writer’s keenness to complete her promising novel). Act- ing-out of embraced desires is having a freedom consistent with determinism; what is inconsistent with it is another kind of freedom we want—one having to do not with either kind of desire but with origination. j.o’g. H. Frankfurt, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, Journal of Philosophy (1971). T. Honderich, A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience and Life-Hopes (Oxford, 1988), ch. 7. emergence. In the philosophy of mind, emergentism is the view that conscious mental states are not reducible to neurological states of the brain, even though they first came into existence only as a result of the evolution of increasing levels of neurological complexity in higher ani- mals. The emergentist may accept that conscious states, such as thoughts and perceptions, need somehow to be ‘realized by’ or ‘grounded in’ underlying neurological states of the subject’s brain, but will typically contend that conscious states make a contribution to the causal explan- ation of animal and human behaviour over and above any explanation that can be provided by neurological states alone. Whether this should be taken to imply that supposedly emergent phenomena like consciousness introduce into the world genuinely novel causal powers is a disputed matter, turning in part on contested issues in the philosophy of causation and causal explanation. Men- tal phenomena are not the only ones that have been claimed to be emergent, even if they provide the most fre- quently cited examples. e.j.l. A. Beckermann, H. Flohr, and J. Kim (eds.), Emergence or Reduc- tion? (Berlin, 1992). emergent properties. A property of a complex system is said to be ‘emergent’ just in case, although it arises out of the properties and relations characterizing its simpler constituents, it is neither predictable from, nor reducible to, these lower-level characteristics. According to emergentism, which flourished during the first half of this century, many properties of wholes are emergent in that sense, and hence ‘genuinely novel’ features of the world in which these wholes have evolved. For example, the transparency of water was held to be emergent on the ground that it could not be inferred from the properties of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms of which water is composed. Emergent properties were contrasted with ‘additive’ or ‘resultant’ properties, e.g. the mass of an emergent properties 239 . wish- ing to extend to the many the rigorous intellectual educa- tion hitherto enjoyed only by the few. But it ran into difficulties. These were partly specific— about whether, for instance, there. valued field to devote themselves to the devel- opment of their talent. To object to this in itself seems, as Nietzsche urged, to be little more than a symptom of envy on the part of the untalented already think there’s a reason to donate: the feelings don’t explain the motive, rather the motive explains the feelings. Another problem with the argument is that it considers only the influence