The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 35 potx

jean-jacques rousseau, wild man of French literature, harbinger of Romanticism; his polemical demand for pop- ular legitimation of government inspired the revolu- tionaries of 1789. auguste comte expounded in the 1830s a positivist theory of knowledge, and put forward sociology as the newest and most complex of the sciences. henri bergson distinguished experienced time from mea- sured time, assigning greater reality to the former; parallel to this was his distinction of the roles of intuition and intellect in acquisition of knowledge. maurice merleau-ponty argued that a person’s appre- hension of the outside world is a two-way process: each, in different senses, gives meaning to the other. french philosophy Understanding these movements is complicated by three factors: what passes for philosophy in France is distorted by its Anglo-American readership; any ‘movement’ in philoso- phy is partly externally constituted by criteria for being a philosopher; and each influential modern French philoso- pher has been something other than a philosopher too. Paradigmatically, phenomenology is the presuppos- itionless description of the contents of experience, with- out any prior ontological commitment to the objective reality or causal properties of those contents. It has both the quasi-Kantian aim of describing the transcendental conditions for knowledge and the quasi-Cartesian aim of providing an ultimate justification of knowledge in the description of the contents of consciousness or ‘phenom- ena’. By ‘knowledge’ is meant here ‘all knowledge’ and so, a fortiori, ‘all philosophical and scientific knowledge’. In the thought of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty this ‘pure’ or Husserlian phenomenology undergoes a Heideggerian transformation (which is partly anticipated in the later writings of Husserl). Notably, the Husserlian thesis that the world of the natural attitude (roughly, ‘common sense’) may be ‘suspended’ to facilitate a phenomeno- logical description of consciousness is rejected and the existential notion ‘being-in-the-world’ substituted. The Husserlian transcendental ego (as ground of the world) is eliminated as not phenomenologically available and a notion of bodily subjectivity replaces it (notably in Sartre’s L’Être et le néant and Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la perception). However, arguably the idea of the body- subject is also anticipated in the second book of Husserl’s Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomeno- logischen Philosophie. Existentialism is an attempt to solve fundamental prob- lems about human existence, notably: what it is to be; the purpose of being; what it is like to face death; the nature of anxiety; the burden of responsibility and freedom; the appropriateness of sexual, political, and religious commit- ments. Existentialism is a reaction against both meta- physics and the essentialism of ‘pure’ phenomenology. Its principal thesis is that existence is logically prior to essence and that human essence is not determined a priori but freely created by human actions. Sartre’s ‘existential’ phenomenology is expounded not only in philosophical works but in plays, novels, short stories, and political tracts. The most brilliant existentialist writer was Simone de Beauvoir. Her Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) explores the question of the essence of woman: its repressive con- stitution by men and its possible free constitution by women. One of the most ambitious projects of post-war French philosophy was Sartre’s attempt in Critique de la raison dialectique (1960) to synthesize existentialism and Marx- ism. Marxism and existentialism are prima facie mutually inconsistent philosophies because, while existentialism emphasizes the freedom of the individual, Marxism is a kind of social determinism; existentialism explores the inside of consciousness and the present moment, but Marxism is a materialism which entails a theory of history; Marxism claims a scientific and objective status for its find- ings; existentialism deliberately repudiates this for itself. Whether Sartre’s putative synthesis is successful or not, in this effort modern French philosophy was engaged in try- ing to solve genuine metaphysical problems. Since the 1960s French philosophy has been a part of the broadly neo-Kantian anti-metaphysical orthodoxy within which much European and Anglo-American philosophy operates. The hallmarks of this paradigm are: the impossi- bility of solving metaphysical problems (but the inevitabil- ity of trying to); the linguistic nature of putative philosophical issues; the minimization of the importance of consciousness, subjectivity, and the present; the attempt to ‘end’ philosophy and replace philosophical problem-solving by something else: political revolution or reform, an examination of language, writing the history of philosophy, literary criticism, the natural sciences. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the Marxist structuralist Louis Althusser, and the literary critic Roland Barthes all operate within broadly Kantian assumptions. The most influential French philosopher at the time of writing is Jacques Derrida. Although Derrida is frequently thought of as making a radical break with previous philoso- phy, this is in fact far from the case. His strategies may be novel within literary criticism, but they are familiar to any- one who has studied Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heideg- ger. All these thinkers are involved, in differing senses and degrees, in a critique of something called ‘Western metaphysics’, and the permutations of that critique have been the ruling philosophical orthodoxy for the last two centuries. Modern French philosophy is usually thought to be a part of ‘modern continental philosophy’, which is con- trasted with Anglo-American ‘analytical’ (or *‘analytic’) philosophy. This distinction does not stand up to geo- graphical, historical, and philosophical scrutiny and it is an important task of future philosophy to show this. How- ever, while philosophers in the English-speaking coun- tries have usually thought that philosophy (although not a science) should aspire to the rigour and precision of the natural sciences, philosophers in modern France have thought that philosophy should be more like art, more like literature. The conspicuous stylistic divergence this has produced has resulted in the illusion of a bifurcation between two philosophical ‘traditions’ and the mistaken idea that there is something radical and distinctive called ‘modern French philosophy’. s.p. *continental philosophy; ‘continental’ and ‘analytic’. Naguib Balandi, Les Constantes de la pensée française (Paris, 1948). Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (London, 1946–75), esp. vol. ix (1975). Lucien Lévy-Brühl, A History of Modern Philosophy in France, tr. G. Coblence (London, 1899). J. G. Merquior, From Prague to Paris (London, 1986). Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement (The Hague, 1960), ii. French philosophy 321 French philosophy today. Recent French philosophy is marked by the decline of the master-thinker. There has been no replacement for the Sartre of the 1950s, the Lévi-Strauss of the 1960s, and the Foucault of the 1970s. Jacques Derrida does continue his immensely productive career and has interestingly expanded his epistemological and metaphysical development of deconstructive read- ings of texts into ethics and politics. Also, there are important philosophers, such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, who have taken up his dense and nervously involuted philosophical style. But Derrida’s impact has from the beginning been much greater in the United States and in literature departments. In so far as there are today ‘major figures’ of philosophy in France, they are presences from the past such as Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricœur, who are of same generation as Sartre, but whose thought was long marginalized, in large part because of its religious roots and implications ( Jewish in the case of Levinas, Christian in the case of Ricœur). As early as the 1930s, Levinas helped introduce Husserl and Heidegger to the French intellectual scene. At first mainly an expositor and critic of their thought, he gradually developed his own distinctive philosophical vision, which appeared with full force in his 1961 book, Totality and Infinity. Here Levinas claimed that our concrete experience of other people involves an absolute ethical obligation toward them, a view developed in the larger context of his insistence that almost all of Western philosophy has been contaminated by an effort to reduce the other (including not only other people but difference in general) to unifying categories of sameness. Levinas explicitly relates our absolute ethical obligation to religion, but he is almost obsessively cautious in denying the adequacy of any of our efforts to speak about God. Ricœur’s early work (for example, his influential trans- lation of, and commentary on, Husserl’s Ideas) was also important for the introduction of phenomenology into France, and his own philosophical views originated from his effort to apply the phenomenological method of care- fully describing our immediate experience to the domain of freedom, sin, and evil. His work on these topics developed through several volumes, but increasingly moved beyond phenomenological description to a hermeneutic standpoint, indebted to Heidegger and Gadamer, which emphasized the need not just to describe our experience but to interpret it in a wider literary, cultural, and historical context. Ricœur’s hermeneutic philosophy provided the basis for his perceptive critiques of the structuralist and post-structualist philosophies that dominated France during the 1960s and 1970s. The turn to Levinas and Ricœur has been accompanied by a revival of interest in phenomenology, although the focus has been more on Husserl and Heidegger than on the French existential phenomenologists Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Here Jean-Luc Marion has done especially important work, which opens new directions of phenomenological reflection and connects them with reli- gious themes (Marion is also a major Catholic theologian). Michel Henry and Jean-François Courtine have also con- tributed to the return to phenomenology. The new-found importance of Ricœur and Levinas (and the return to phenomenology) corresponds to a reac- tion against the philosophical and political radicalism asso- ciated with the 1968 student revolution. The same reaction underlies the return to broadly Kantian thinking in the writings of Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut. For example, in their jointly authored French Philosophy of the Sixties, Ferry and Renaut agree that Heidegger and his followers have undermined the idea of a ‘self-transparent subject that lays claim to mastery of everything that exists’; i.e. the transcendental ego of Kantian idealism. But they go on to argue against the post-structuralist elimination of the sub- ject as a category of theoretical philosophy and for the reality of an ego that is not metaphysically privileged but embedded in historical reality and nevertheless the sub- ject of ethical rights and responsibilities. Ferry and Renaut also represent an important revival of liberal poltical theory in France. Whereas earlier thinkers, from Sartre through Lyotard and Deleuze, seemed to allow no alternatives to leftist radicalism or rightist reac- tion, there is now a striking move to the centre, which has led to a new respect for previously marginalized writers such as Albert Camus and Raymond Aron, and has led important philosophers to see genuine possibilities of co-operation with established governments. (Luc Ferry, for example, is currently Minister of Education.) The current French scene also includes a lively interest in analytic philosophy. There are roots for this interest in a long and distinguished French tradition of logic and phil- osophy of mathematics, beginning with Louis Couturat at the turn of the twentieth century and continuing through Jean Nicod, Jacques Herbrand, and Jean Cavail- lès. But this group had relatively little impact, partly because none of its members lived beyond the age of fifty. Today, the most prominent French philosopher with a strong commitment to the analytic approach is Jacques Bouveresse, whose earlier work was largely inspired by Wittgenstein, on whom he wrote important commen- taries, and whose thought he used as a basis for his own discussions of epistemology and philosophy of mind. More recently, Bouveresse has presented himself as in the line of ‘Austrian philosophy’, which he sees as beginning with Bolzano’s critique of Kant and continuing through Brentano and Meinong to Wittgenstein and the *Vienna Circle. This Austrian line ignored Hegel and his idealistic successors, thereby avoiding the philosophical styles and questions that characterize recent ‘continental’ philosophy. More recently, there has emerged a group of younger French analytic philosophers centred on the Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée (CREA) at the École Polytechnique, and subsequently at the Institut Nicod. Pascal Engel (who did his doctoral work with Bouveresse), Pierre Jacob, and Daniel Andler are just 322 French philosophy today a few of the French philosophers who have become significant contributors to, for example, analytic philoso- phy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of science. There is no doubt that France is quickly taking its place in the increasingly international enterprise of analytic philosophy. The question remaining is whether there will develop a distinctively French school of analytic philosophy or whether French analytic philosophers will remain individual contributors to discussions defined by the dominant interests of American and British philosophy. A category frequently employed in discussions of recent French philosophy is that of ‘French feminist philosophers’. There is no doubt that feminist themes loom large in the work of major French philosophers from Simone de Beauvoir to Luce Irigaray and beyond. But much of the work of many important feminist thinkers in France (e.g. Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva) is well beyond the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy, and the work of the major ‘feminist philosophers’ deserves attention even apart from their contributions to feminist discussions. Luce Irigaray, for example, is best regarded as a ‘philoso- pher of difference’, in the general manner of Derrida, Lyotard, and Deleuze. Her focus has been on sexual difference, but in a way that uses feminist issues to over- come what she sees as limitations in traditional thought about the most fundamental issues of human existence. Similarly, Michèle Le Doeuff develops her feminist thought in the context of a historically informed phil- osophy of science. Her work is particularly interesting because, while originating in the distinctively French trad- ition of history and philosophy of science (particularly the work of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem), it also readily engages with Anglo-American work on science. Finally, mention should be made of two increasingly influential, if hard to categorize, philosophers: Michel Serres and Alain Badiou. Serres began as a philosopher of science, broadly in the manner of Bachelard, who questioned orthodox distinctions between science and non-science. He later developed, in a series of academic best-sellers, a poetico-philosophical cosmology that pre- sents a metaphysics inspired by chaos theory and fractal geometry. Badiou likewise combines mathematics and ontology in a systematic philosophy that challenges the historicist assumptions of French philosophy of the 1970s and 1980s and rejects the post-structuralist claim that the end of philosophy is near. Philosophy without master-thinkers has its advan- tanges. Recent French thought lacks the dramatic and dis- ruptive originality of thinkers such as Sartre and Foucault, but it has, in many cases, a stylistic clarity and theoretical openness that were long missing from the philosophical scene. As in the early years of the twentieth century, early twenty-first-century French philosophy is less drastically creative but, perhaps, more able to contribute to the civility and rationality of its age. On the other hand, there is a real danger that this more subdued mode of philosophizing will split into various elements (phenom- enology, feminism, analytic philosophy), each merely part of an international discussion, and lose the distinctive flair that has characterized French philosophy for the last sixty years. g.g. F. Dosse, History of Structuralism, tr. D. Glassman (Minneapolis, 1997). L. Ferry and A. Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties, tr. M. Catani (Amherst, Mass., 1990). A. P. Griffiths (ed.), Contemporary French Philosophy (Cambridge, 1987). G. Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2001). M. Lilla (ed.), New French Political Philosophy (Princeton, NJ, 1994). E. Matthews, Twentieth-Century French Philosophy (Oxford, 1996). frequency theory: see probability. Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939). Freud is sometimes said to have discovered the *unconscious, but it is not a claim he made himself. The unconscious which he did not discover is the notion that if those everyday explanations which invoke motives, desires, impulses, etc., and normally carry the implication that the subject is authoritative with respect to them, are extended to cases in which this impli- cation is suspended, behaviour otherwise perplexing can be explained. This notion of the unconscious pre-dates Freud. What distinguishes Freud’s unconscious is the notion that when the subject’s loss of authority with respect to his own mental states is due to a process he called ‘repression’, these states are subject to transform- ations which render them unrecognizable by the subject and may have pathological consequences. The conviction that, when the subject came to stand to these contents as to his accessible ones, they were deprived of pathogenic power, yielded a therapeutic method. Two ingredients were added to produce the character- istic Freudian view of the springs of action—sexuality and infancy. What gave Freud’s aetiological speculations their further distinctiveness were the diagnostic procedures on which they were based, in particular the use of interpret- ation and free association. When these were applied to dreams, errors, and the behaviour of the patient towards the therapist in the analytic setting (‘the transference’), they uncovered the repressed pathogenic material. This material was found to display two invariable features—it dated from infancy and pertained to the subject’s infantile sexual life. At first the pathogenic episodes in question were thought to be sexual molestation (‘the seduction theory’); these were later replaced by the child’s struggle with its own incestuous and perverse wishes (‘the Oedipus com- plex’ and ‘polymorphous perversity’). The transition from the seduction theory to its successor, the infantile Oedipus complex, was facilitated when, during Freud’s self- analysis, an infantile memory of being sexually excited by his mother’s nudity was aroused. This helped persuade Freud, Sigmund 323 him that the sexual material which had led him to impute infantile seductions to his patients could have an alternative source in their self-protectively distorted infantile incestuous fantasizing. The anomaly involved in accounting for the neuroses of predominantly female patients by invoking the desires of male infants for their mothers escaped notice for some time, but eventually prompted a suspicion that Freud’s aetiological specula- tions were more remote from clinical experience and dependent on idiosyncratic pre-occupations than the tradition acknowledged. The major developments in Freud’s theorizing after the First World War comprised the replacement of the ori- ginal division between conscious and unconscious with a tripartite division into id, ego, and superego (with the corollary that portions of the ego were unconscious); the reconstrual of anxiety as the cause rather than the product of repression; the stipulation that the self-preservative instincts were themselves libidinal, with the further exten- sion of the concept of libido to encompass an indeterminate range of phenomena previously excluded, and the intro- duction of a death instinct. The rationales for these changes are still disputed and their implications for clinical practice unclear. Attempts to clarify Freud’s metapsycho- logical speculations or reduce them to consistency have proved vain to date and the suggestion has been often made that they be abandoned. Freud’s postulation of a death instinct, an impulse to return to a pre-organic state of quietude, has in particular provoked much scepticism. It was introduced in 1922, for a combination of reasons which have been found so inad- equate that Ernest Jones thought it necessary to impute the innovation to some personal motive which, Max Schur maintained, was the death of a beloved daughter in the influenza epidemic of 1919. The relative contribution of this episode, and of Schopenhauer’s view that the goal of life is death, can only be a matter for conjecture. Freud tells us that on his visit to America he was impressed by a sign which read, ‘why live when you can be buried for ten dollars?’ This suggests a temperamental affinity with the notion of a death instinct which may have led him to overlook its theoretical deficiencies. Freud’s extension of the concept libido to encompass ‘love for parents and children, friendship, love for human- ity in general, devotion to concrete objects and abstract ideas’ also occasioned misgivings in some quarters. It was not clear why such impulses should be repressed, or how, if repressed, they would produce the phenomena of neu- roses whose apparently minute articulation with sexual mentation in its previously restricted, carnal sense gave Freud’s early libidinal accounts of symptom-formation their persuasive power. Some critics felt entitled to impute the tenacity with which Freud clung to a sexual conception of libido to some deeply personal compulsion and could have cited in support the incoherence between his asser- tion that the majority of mankind feel degraded by the sex- ual act and are reluctant to perform it and his contradictory insistence that sexual gratification is ‘one of . . . life’s culminations’ and that ‘apart from a few perverse fanatics all the world knows this and conducts life accordingly’. During his lifetime Freud was generally regarded as a figure of unquestionable integrity. Several more recent memorialists and commentators have offered a less flat- tering picture of someone whose pronouncements were too often dominated by the polemical needs of the moment and whose probity deserted him whenever his more profound interests were at stake. f.c. *psychoanalysis, philosophical problems of; Reich; unconscious and subconcious mind. R. Dalbiez, The Method and Doctrine of Freud (London, 1940). Ernest Jones, Freud: Life and Work (New York, 1953–7). M. MacMillan, Freud Evaluated (Amsterdam, 1990). Max Schur, Freud: Living and Dying (New York, 1972). friendship. Attachment characterized by disinterestedness and esteem. Aristotle contrasts friendship proper with rela- tionships entered into for pleasure or advantage, ‘because in them the friend is not loved for being what he is in himself’. The philosophical problems of friendship are to explain: (1) how friendship can be worth while if not for pleasure or advantage, since, as Aristotle observes, ‘no one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other good things in the world’; (2) how friendship, like family relationships, can generate obligations not had towards those who are not my friends; (3) how it can be justifiable to love you as a friend while withholding friend- ship from others who share the qualities I esteem in you, since to do otherwise is not (for example) to ‘love you for yourself alone and not your yellow hair’ (Yeats). p.g. *loyalty; fraternity; love. L. Blum, Friendship, Altruism and Morality (London, 1980). function. A function takes objects (*‘arguments’) and maps them on to objects (‘values’). For example, the add- ition function defined on the set of natural numbers takes pairs of natural numbers as its arguments and maps each pair, say 2 and 3, on to the value, here 5, which is the sum of the pair. Functions are often identified with set- theoretical constructions. So the doubling function, with the set of natural numbers as its domain of arguments, is identified with the set of ordered pairs, 〈x,y〉, such that y is twice x. Functions need not be numerical; Frege took con- cepts to be functions which mapped objects on to truth- values. (This has little connection with the non-technical sense of ‘function’, roughly ‘purpose’, which is also, of course, widely used by philosophers.) a.d.o. P. Suppes, Introduction to Logic (Princeton, NJ, 1957), ch. 11. functional explanation: see teleological explanation. functionalism. The theory that the condition for being in a mental state should be given by the functional role of the state, that is, in terms of its standard causal relationships, rather than by supposed intrinsic features of the state. The 324 Freud, Sigmund role is normally envisaged as being specified in terms of which states (typically) produce it and which other states and behavioural outputs will (typically) be produced by it when the state interacts with further mental states and perceptual inputs. The theory, pioneered by David Arm- strong and Hilary Putnam, improves on *behaviourism because it recognizes that behaviour results from clusters of mental states, and allows that the term for the state, e.g. ‘S’s pain’, refers to a real inner condition which has the functional role. In one version the functional analysis was supposed to be a priori, and a ground for affirming a materi- alist *identity theory. Putnam proposed it as a scientific alternative to identity theories, and analysed function in terms of *Turing machines. Discussion has concerned whether conscious states can be exhaustively analysed in functional terms. A modified version has been suggested in which function is explained in terms of biological (rather than causal) role. p.f.s. *consciousness; consciousness, its irreducibility; inverted spectrum; mind, syntax, and semantics; dual- ism; Putnam. N. Block, ‘Troubles With Functionalism’, in N. Block (ed.), Read- ings in Philosophical Psychology, i (London, 1980). future: see time. future contingents. On one definition, a future contin- gent is a claim about the future, or is the content of a future-tense indicative sentence. On another, it is the pos- sible truth-condition for such a claim: a future state of affairs that might or might not obtain. It may be argued that future contingent claims are neither true nor false until the states of affairs they are used to predict obtain or fail to obtain. s.p. *sea-battle argument. Aristotle’s Categories and De Interpretatione, ed. J. L. Ackrill (Oxford, 1963): De Interpretatione, book IX. William of Ockham, Philosophical Writings: A Selection (Indiana- polis, 1990). future generations. Do we have moral obligations to future generations? Most of us believe that we do. We are obligated, for example, not to harm them in certain ways and also to share the earth’s resources with them in a way that is just. Some theorists have argued that we are obli- gated to ensure that future generations will exist (or at least not to prevent them from existing), while others have claimed that we owe it to them, by controlling popula- tion growth, to ensure that there are not too many future people existing at any one time. Moral theories have, however, had notorious problems in providing an adequate account of the foundations of these obligations. For example, those theories that regard morality as a set of conventions that it is in our interests to obey because they facilitate peace and co-operation can- not ground obligations to future people since the latter cannot benefit or harm us (except perhaps posthu- mously). And hypothetical contractarianism (*contract, social), to which many theorists have appealed, has been unable to determine who should be included among the contractors who must reach agreement on principles of justice between generations. Some have argued that the contractors should all be members of a single generation; others have said that they should include everyone who has ever lived or ever will live; while others have claimed that they should include all possible people. Each of these proposals has proven unsatisfactory. Given the problems with approaches of these sorts, many have thought that the best approach is simply to assume that our behaviour must be constrained by a respect for the rights and interests of future people in much the same way that it is constrained by the rights and interests of existing people. There are, of course, prob- lems with predicting how our acts will affect future people, what their needs and interests will be, and so on. And there is a further question whether, because there are presumably so many of them relative to us, we are entitled to apply a discount rate to their interests according to their temporal distance from us. But it has been thought that these problems are in principle manageable. Views of this sort are, however, all vulnerable to a powerful objection, advanced by Derek Parfit, which is based on the fact that most of the decisions that we make that have a substantial impact on the future quality of life also affect who will exist in the future. For the implemen- tation of a social policy has widespread effects on the details of people’s lives—e.g. who meets whom, who mar- ries whom, and when people conceive their children. These effects help to determine who comes to exist. But, if it is true of a future person that he would not have existed had a certain policy not been implemented in the past, then, unless his life is not worth living, it cannot be worse for him that the policy was adopted. Hence even policies that pollute the environment or deplete resources may not be worse for future people, or violate their rights, since those people may owe their existence to the fact that those policies were implemented. Parfit and others have concluded from this that our obligations with respect to future people must be based, not on facts about how our acts affect individuals for bet- ter or worse, but on considerations that are more imper- sonal in character. But traditional moral theories that take an impersonal form—such as the total and average ver- sions of *consequentialism—have proved to have notori- ously implausible implications when applied to questions concerning future and possible people. (*Population.) Hence reflection on our obligations to future generations has resulted in a profound challenge to moral theory itself. j.m cm. Brian Barry, ‘Justice between Generations’, in Liberty and Justice (Oxford, 1991). Peter Laslett and James S. Fishkin (eds.), Justice between Age Groups and Generations (New Haven, Conn., 1992). D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984). future generations 325 326 fuzzy logic fuzzy logic. Logical system which allows degrees of truth. For example, where ‘1’ denotes truth, and ‘0’ falsity, p might be true to degree 0.7 and so false to degree 0.3. In general, if p is true to degree n, then p is false to degree 1 – n. Fuzzy logic is a departure from classical logic, because a proposition may be to some extent both true and false, and a proposition and its negation to some extent both true. Classical logic, in a sense, is a version of fuzzy logic, that version in which the only admissible truth-values in the range from 0 to 1 are 0 and 1. Arguably, fuzzy logic does justice to the intuitive idea that some indicative sentences are not wholly true and not wholly false. For example, the claim ‘He is in the room’ seems not wholly true and not wholly false but partly true and partly false if he is leaving the room at the time of utterance. s.p. A. Kandel, Fuzzy Mathematical Techniques with Applications (Boston, 1986). L. A. Zadeh, ‘Fuzzy Sets’, Information and Control (1965). Gabirol, Ibn: see Ibn Gabirol. Gadamer, Hans Georg (1900–2002). German philosopher who was a pupil of Heidegger and the leading modern exponent of *hermeneutics. In Truth and Method (1960; tr. London, 1975), he tries to clarify the phenomenon of *understanding. Understand- ing (Verstehen) contrasts with the explanation (Erklären) characteristic of the natural sciences. Under- standing is performed both by cultural scientists and by non-scientists; even natural scientists understand each other’s speech and writing. We understand utterances, texts, people, works of art, and historical events. Earlier hermeneuticists attempted to refine a methodology for the proper interpretation of such entities. But they failed to grasp that their own understanding of an object, and the methodological principles they devised, were historically conditioned. Cultures change over history. The inter- preter of a text from a past culture belongs to and is conditioned by his own different culture; he is an ‘effective-historical consciousness’ who views the past and its remnants from a particular *‘horizon’, involving a particular ‘pre-understanding’. His understanding thus involves an interplay between past and present, a ‘fusion of horizons’. Plato, for example, is interpreted differently by Neoplatonists of the sixth century ad, by nineteenth- century Germans, and by twentieth-century English scholars. We cannot decide which of these interpretations is correct, since any verdict we give is historically condi- tioned and liable to revision by a later age. (We cannot even be sure that our interpretation of past interpretations is correct.) At best our interpretation can be ‘authentic’, making the best reflective use of the pre-understanding or ‘prejudice’ from which we inevitably begin. Thus we should explore our own pre-understanding and all the relations to the world and to history that it involves. Our understanding of the past and its remains not only depends on, but also promotes, our ‘self-understanding’. In Truth and Method Gadamer begins with the under- standing of works of art, and several later essays concern art (The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (Cam- bridge, 1986)). His central concern is the experience of art, rather than our judgements about art or the intentions and genius of the artist, and he tries to describe it as accur- ately as possible. The artwork rather than the audience is the pivot of this experience, and thus ‘play’ is a suitable term to describe it, in the sense of a game that ‘tends to master the players’. Truth is not the exclusive preserve of science; thus not only interpretations of art, but the art- work itself, make a claim to truth. Works of art are not isol- ated from the world, and the experience of art ‘does not leave him who has it unchanged’. An authentic experience of it involves not a historical reconstruction of the circum- stances of its original production, but a living relationship to it which shows that it still has something to say in our epoch. Gadamer devoted several works to the interpretation of other philosophers, especially Heidegger, Hegel, and Plato. His interpretations depend on certain principles which are not universally shared. We must take account of the nature of the text, whether it is, for example, a pol- ished dialogue or a set of lecture notes. We must also take account of the context in which a statement is made, its intended audience, and the question which it is designed to answer. For example, an argument in a Platonic dia- logue should not be considered and assessed simply as an isolated argument. We should consider its role in the dia- logue, its effect on the specific audience to which it is addressed, and the background question to which it is a response. Gadamer thus purports to replace the logic of propositions with ‘the logic of question and answer’. (He argues, in The Idea of the Good in Platonic–Aristotelian Philoso- phy (1978; tr. New Haven, Conn., 1986), that if we inter- pret Plato and Aristotle in this way we shall see that their thought is in essence continuous and that they have far more in common than is usually supposed.) Despite his admiration for Hegel, Gadamer is at odds with him here: for Hegel, unlike Schleiermacher, Plato’s use of the dia- logue form is an essentially irrelevant adornment for a philosophical system which can be better expressed in continuous prose. m.j.i. R. Dostal (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer (Cambridge, 2002). H. J. Silverman (ed.), Gadamer and Hermeneutics (London, 1991). G. Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason (Oxford, 1987). J. C. Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics (New Haven, Conn., 1985). G Galen (ad 129–c.200). Greek doctor and philosopher from Pergamon, Asia Minor. Although known principally as a doctor, he wrote many books devoted to philosophical topics. He advocated the study of logic and the theory of demonstration as essential for being a good doctor, and wrote several books on logical theory. He also wrote works concerning causation, psychology, moral philoso- phy, language, and rhetoric, as well as commentaries on Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, and Epicurus, and polemical books against the Stoics. Most of these are now lost. He probably did not invent the fourth figure of Aris- totelian syllogistic, but certainly did make one important contribution to logical theory, in his Introduction to Logic. He saw that neither Aristotelian nor Stoic logic could account for the validity of the following inference: a = b, b = c, therefore a = c. To account for its validity, and that of other arguments like it, he introduced a third kind of syllogism, ‘relational syllogisms’. Galen thinks that there is a systematic or logical way of discovering the truths of medicine—i.e. the theory of demonstration. But he also concedes that experience plays a role in the acquisition of medical knowledge. It is there- fore a matter of some interest what his precise position is concerning how medical knowledge is acquired, and how it relates to the schools of medicine of his time. b.m. Jonathan Barnes, ‘“A Third Kind of Syllogism”—Galen and the Logic of Relations’, in R. Sharples (ed.), Modern Thinkers and Ancient Thinkers (London, 1993). Michael Frede, ‘On Galen’s Epistemology’, in Essays in Ancient Philosophy (Oxford, 1987). R. Walzer and M. Frede (eds.), Galen: Three Treatises on the Nature of Science (Indianapolis, 1985). Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). Galileo was an astronomer and physicist whose influence on the development of sci- entific and philosophical thought can hardly be over- stated. No retiring scholar but a controversialist at home in the leading universities and palaces of Renaissance Italy until condemned by the Roman Inquisition, Galileo opposed by both word and deed the imposition of author- ity on the study of natural phenomena, and supported freedom of inquiry and expression. In opposition to *Aristotelianism, Galileo insisted that mathematics was at the heart of physics. He developed his laws of motion by introducing careful measurement into empirical investigations, and combined this with thought experiments and deductive argument to show that he was no narrow inductivist or empiricist. He then demolished the naked-eye astronomy that had existed from prehis- toric times by turning his telescope to the sky, discovering evidence that was decisive against the Aristotelian–Ptolem- aic cosmos while supporting Copernicus. The story of Galileo’s conflict with the Roman Church is well known—how in 1633 he was condemned for endorsing Copernicanism in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), having been forbidden to do so in 1616. Nevertheless, the standard interpretation of this story has been disputed by Redondi, who, using previously unexplored Vatican archives, claims that Galileo’s real crime in the eyes of the Church was not his Copernicanism but his atomist theory of matter, which was incompatible with the doctrine of transubstantiation, and therefore challenged the sacrament of the Eucharist. But a potentially capital accusation of heresy against so well known a figure as Galileo would have been a dangerous scandal, so he faced the lesser, trumped-up charges instead. Publicly Galileo recanted, but his further scientific work shows that in spite of the real danger he continued to defend the free exercise of human reason and experience and remained a steadfast pioneer of science as a secular vocation, while never wavering in his attachment to religion. a.bel. *persecution of philosophers. Peter Machamer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Galileo (Cam- bridge, 1998). Pietro Redondi, Galileo: Heretic (London, 1988). gambler’s fallacy, or Monte Carlo fallacy. ‘Red has come up a lot recently; so probably it won’t come up next time.’ This is not itself so much a fallacy as just a bad reason. The underlying fallacy is to infer from, say, ‘The probability of five reds running is low’ to ‘Given four reds running, the probability of a fifth is low’. The earlier outcomes do not affect the probability of a red next time; or, if they do, they must make it higher, by being evidence of bias in the wheel. c.a.k. game theory. The formalized study of rational action in situations where the welfare of each agent in a group depends on how other group members act. A game is specified by, for each participating agent, a set of permit- ted strategies and a set of preferences between outcomes. Agents are ‘perfectly rational’: in particular, they act so as to maximize expected utility, where expected utility is a measure of the likely benefit to them of their actions given their preferences between outcomes. The game specifica- tion and each agent’s rationality are standardly presumed to be common knowledge: each agent knows these, each agent knows that the other agents know these, and so on. So each agent acts assuming that the other agents are rational and that they will act on the same assumption. Solutions to games standardly prescribe Nash equilibria: each agent’s strategy must maximize expected utility given the strategies of the others. t.p. *decision theory. R. Luce and H. Raiffa, Games and Decisions (New York, 1957). Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1869–1948). Hindu political activist with the uncompromising religious– philosophical ideal that non-injury is the only means to truth. In an age ravaged by two world wars, Gandhi suc- cessfully practised the method of non-violence in mass *civil-disobedience movements against racism in South Africa and against colonialism and untouchability in India. This method he called satya¯graha or ‘zest for truth’. In 328 Galen Gandhi’s moral philosophy, *means and ends form a con- tinuum, and no end ever justifies large-scale killing. In any conflict, the antagonist should be looked upon as a fellow searcher for truth. He should be won over through per- suasion and self-suffering, not through deceit and brute force. Such unarmed resistance, far from being passive, calls for active love and self-control, which eventually makes individuals fit for political self-government. a.c. Joan V. Bondurant, Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (Princeton, NJ, 1988). Garden, the: see Epicureanism. Gassendi, Pierre (1592–1655). A Catholic priest too often known to philosophers merely as the author of a set of objections to Descartes’s Meditations, Gassendi was an important and influential seventeenth-century figure in his own right. Gassendi used the scepticism of Sextus Empiricus against Aristotle and *Aristotelianism, though it is doubtful that he was himself a whole-hearted sceptic. His espousal of Epicurean *atomism, combined with his voluntarism and consequent empiricism, had a profound effect on the subsequent philosophy of the century, strongly influencing both Boyle and Newton. Like them, he was a mechanist, but not a materialist. It was largely as a result of his efforts that atomism was seen as a viable can- didate for the vacancy created by the increasing unsatis- factoriness of both the Aristotelian and the Paracelsan pictures of the world. j.j.m. Barry Brundell, Pierre Gassendi: From Aristotelianism to a New Nat- ural Philosophy (Dordrecht, 1987). Gauthier, David (1932– ). Canadian moral philosopher who has specialized in the study of the relationship between reason and morality. He is a leading contempor- ary proponent of the view, descending from Hobbes, that morality is based on the long-term self-interest of each individual, rather than on any inherent concern or respect for the interests or moral standing of others. Gauthier has tried to develop this ‘contractarian’ approach, and its determinate implications, using the tools of rational choice theory, culminating in his influential Morals by Agreement (1986). Gauthier has also written a series of intriguing articles that offer radical reinterpretations of Locke, Kant, and Hume, drawing out their contractarian elements. Gauthier is currently the Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. w.k. *contract, social. David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford, 1986). gavagai: see translation, indeterminacy of. Geach, Peter Thomas (1919– ). British logician with wide-ranging philosophical interests. An admirer and expositor of McTaggart. Mental Acts (1958) attacks abstrac- tionism and dispositionalist accounts of mind, and interestingly modifies Russell’s account of judgement. Reference and Generality (1962) demonstrates the inad- equacy of medieval and modern theories of suppositio or *denotation. Thus in ‘Every soldier swears’, ‘every sol- dier’ does not stand for some entity which is said to swear, but ‘every’ indicates the way in which the predicate ‘swear’ latches on to the subject ‘soldier’. A vigorous defence of Christian morality and *theodicy is given in The Virtues and Providence and Evil (both 1977). He holds the controversial view that something could be the same A, but not the same B, as something (relative identity). Geach’s style is combative, jargon-free, and exploits for- gotten riches of English vocabulary. Elizabeth Anscombe was his wife. c.j.f.w. Harry A. Lewis (ed.), Peter Geach: Philosophical Encounters (Dor- drecht, 1991). Geist : see spirit. gender. Term introduced by feminists in order that the social aspect of sexual difference should not be ignored. When the difference between male and female human beings is treated as one of ‘sex’, it may be thought to be accounted for biologically. Speaking of gender, one acknowledges the socio-cultural determination of the concepts women and men, and admits a conception of women and men as distinguished primarily by a difference of social position. j.horn. *feminism; sex. Christine Delphy, Close to Home (London, 1984), intro. generalization. As this term is most commonly used, a generalization is an ‘all’ statement, to the effect that all objects of a certain general kind possess a certain prop- erty—for example, the statement ‘All planets move in elliptical orbits’. It is customary to distinguish between ‘lawlike’ and ‘accidental’ generalizations, the one just cited being lawlike whereas one such as ‘All the coins in my pocket are silver’ is accidental. How to analyse this dis- tinction is a disputed issue, but it is widely accepted that only lawlike generalizations support corresponding counterfactual *conditionals. Thus ‘All planets move in elliptical orbits’ implies ‘If Vulcan were a planet, it would move in an elliptical orbit’, whereas ‘All the coins in my pocket are silver’ does not imply ‘If this penny were in my pocket, it would be silver’. e.j.l. N. Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 4th edn. (Cambridge, Mass., 1983). generalization, rule of. An inference rule of the *predi- cate or functional calculus. Let α be an individual variable and Φ a *well-formed formula. The rule is: From Φ infer ( α)Φ, where Φ holds for any arbitrary individual. The notation ‘( α)’ represents the universal quantifier and is read ‘For all α’. Alternative notations are ‘Π α ’ and ‘∀ α ’. generalization, rule of 329 . errors, and the behaviour of the patient towards the therapist in the analytic setting ( the transference’), they uncovered the repressed pathogenic material. This material was found to display. ‘repression’, these states are subject to transform- ations which render them unrecognizable by the subject and may have pathological consequences. The conviction that, when the subject came to stand to these. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement (The Hague, 1960), ii. French philosophy 321 French philosophy today. Recent French philosophy is marked by the decline of the master-thinker. There has been