The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 48 pdf

and scholastic freedom. The results were complex and far- reaching. Major outcomes were the creation of Shı¯‘ite thought based on multiple sources, possessing reason and defining a political–philosophical place for al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯’s ‘learned’ reformers of law and for the role of a supreme informed source, whose authority was established by unified epistemological theories combining Peripatetic and Illuminationist concepts; and a parallel judicial tradition based on revealed authority. This period of revival led not only to the recovery of nearly the entire range of earlier philosophical works, but also to the third major synthesis and recomposition of philosophy, which proved consist- ent with theories of revelation and was accepted by most contemporaneous religious scholars. While most problems in earlier syncretic works continued to be debated, many were also added, refined, and redefined to reflect this period’s preoccupation with uniform theories. Foremost thinkers of this period included Mı¯r Da¯ma¯d; his acclaimed pupil Molla¯S . adra¯, and other members of the School of Isfahan; and Mı¯r Fendereskı¯ and Shaykh Baha¯’ı¯, who excelled in scientific and mathematical discoveries. All contributed to what became a systematic reconstruction defined by Molla¯S . adra¯ as ‘metaphysical philosophy’, which continues to this day as the third independent school of Islamic philosophy. Structurally distinguished from both the Peripatetic and the Illuminationist systems, metaphysical philosophy is principally characterized by a singular emphasis on the question of being. Logic is sep- arated and discussed in independent works which include the subject-matter of the traditional Isagoge, exclude the Categories and the Poetics, and are divided into three parts: semantics, formal techniques, and material logic. Molla¯ S . adra¯’s own independent magnum opus on metaphysical philosophy is the voluminous work The Four Intellectual Journeys. This text begins with the study of being, and reduces the traditional subject of physics primarily to the study of time, modality, and motion. A modified theory of five categories is introduced through a unified theory named ‘motion-in-category substance’ (also called substantial motion). This further serves to explain a uniform theory of being, further employed to define a unified theory of knowledge, finally explaining creation as a non-natural, non-causal ‘substantial motion’ away from the One in durationless time, a concept taught by Mı¯r Da¯ma¯d, who is widely known for the theory of creation defined as ‘eternal becoming’ (h . udu¯th dahrı¯). Among the philosophical problems extensively discussed, and reformulated and refined by Molla¯S . adra¯, the following stands out: the reformulated Illuminationist unified epistemological theory of knowledge by presence, where the foundation proposition is stated as the unity of the intellect and the intellected. The initial creative and innovative phase of this period soon deteriorated, particularly in the areas of science and technology. Philosophical activity, however, continued to take place, mostly among members of the now-defined clergy groups. The Post-medieval Period: The Early Seventeenth Century to the late Twentieth Century. The final period in Islamic philosophy may be distinguished by a scholastic tradition that continues to the present. One of its main characteristic components is the acceptance of works by religious scholars, especially those of Molla¯S . adra¯. Although a large number of philosophers from this period have not been studied completely, a recent biographical compilation lists some 400 individuals, each with several works on specific philosophical and logical subjects. Most of the authors are identified as members of the clergy class, some of whom also assumed juridical duties. This scholastic tradition marks the final acceptance of philosophy by religion. Molla¯ S . adra¯ incorporated Fa¯ra¯bı¯’s idea of learned reformers with Sohravardı¯’s ‘inspired sources of authority’ into a unified theory. Thus, the select religious scholars, possessing knowledge and inspiration, were confirmed as the legitimate ‘guardians’ of just rule. This unified theory also became the final channel for the continuity of philosophy. Although the study of higher levels of philosophy is still restricted, the scholastic tradition incorporated aspects of philosophy into the school curricula. One of the first ‘primers’ studied by beginning students includes a section on logic. Some of the Shı¯ ‘a doctrines that accept the role of independent reason (ijtiha¯d) in principles of jurisprudence have been central in the scholastic tradition of Islamic philosophy in Iran from the sixteenth century—which marks the final harmonization of philosophy with religion—to the present. This is exemplified by many prominent contemporary clergy known and revered for their philosophical teachings, such as Abol-Hasan Qazvı¯nı¯, Alla¯meh Husayn Taba¯taba¯’ı¯, Mehdi Ashtiya¯nı¯, Jala¯l Ashtiya¯nı¯, and Mehdi Ha’iri Yazdı¯. The latter also turned to the systematic study of contemporary analytic philosophy, receiving his doctorate in philosophy in Toronto in 1979. His book The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy: Know- ledge by Presence (Albany, NY, 1992) is the first serious work that describes certain key problems of Islamic philosophy within a contemporary analytic frame. This type of scholarship marks the beginning of a new trend in which some Islamic philosophers are studying various Western philosophical systems and methods and making attempts to explain them within the frameworks of one or more of the three Islamic schools of thought. These scholars are also attempting to open a dialogue with Western practi- tioners, thus reaching beyond the limits of previous historical descriptions and generalizations by Muslims and Orientalists. h.z. Majid Fakhry, Islamic Philosophy (New York, 1983). Ibn Kamm’na, Refinement and Commentary on Suhrawardı¯’s Intim- ations: A Thirteenth Century Text on Natural Philosophy and Psychology, critical edition, with introduction and analysis by Hossein Ziai and Ahmed Alwishah (Costa Mesta, 2003). O. Leaman and S. H. Nasr (eds.), The Routledge History of Islamic Philosophy (London, 1998). Mohsen Mahdi, Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (Glen- coe, Ill., 1962). F. Rahman, ‘Dream, Imagination and ‘Alam al-Mithal’, Islamic Studies, 3 (1964). 450 Islamic philosophy M. M. Sharif, A History of Muslim Philosophy, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1963–6). Sohravardı¯, The Book of Radiance, ed. and tr. Hossein Ziai (Costa Mesa, 1998). —— The Philosophy of Illumination, a new critical edition with English translation, notes, commentary, and introduction by John Walbridge and Hossein Ziai (Provo, Ut., 1999). Islamic philosophy today. Within modern times a number of themes in Islamic philosophy have become much discussed. One topic is how distinct that philosophy ought to be from other types of world philosophy, in particular systems of thought not based on religion. Another, related issue is what relationship Islamic philosophy should have with Western thought. Further, some thinkers in the Islamic world have taken general philosophical ideas and have applied them to what they see as the leading issues of the day within their cultural environment. Finally, traditional ways of doing philosophy have continued, albeit with some importation of wider theoretical machinery. An issue which philosophers have dealt with at some length is the relationship that the Islamic world should have with the West. This issue is of course one that has existed for some time, but arose with particular force from the nineteenth century onwards with the success of colo- nialism, imperialism, and Zionism in apparently gaining supremacy over the Islamic world. In earlier periods the Islamic world had represented a superior cultural and material force in the world, but over the last few centuries it had radically declined, and the reasons for this apparent decadence were, and continue to be, much discussed by philosophers. Of great significance was the Nahda, or Islamic renaissance, which started in the nineteenth century and really took root in Egypt. The idea behind it was to maintain a distinctive Islamic identity within the Islamic world, yet at the same time incorporate modern scientific and cultural values, where these are compatible with Islam. The two leading thinkers were Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad ‘Abduh, who both argued that Islam is per- fectly rational and in no way opposed by Western scientific and cultural ideas. The Egyptian philosopher Mustafa ‘Abd al-Raziq extended their ideas and suggested that all the main Islamic schools of thought, even the mystical schools of Sufism which were much suspected by the Nahda thinkers, are inherently rational and in no way opposed to the science and rationality which are such an important feature of Western culture. Some Arab thinkers have been more sceptical of this point. Muhammad ‘Abd al-Jabri is critical of much traditional Islamic thought, arguing that we need to analyse clearly the reasons for the decline of the Arab world. He calls for a deconstruction of the clash between those who emphasize the glory of the Islamic past and those who praise Western modernity. What is required is a liberation of the Arab consciousness from its traditional ties with its Islamic heritage, yet also a cautious attitude to the ideas which have come from the West and are part and parcel of foreign domination. Fu‘ad Zakariyya agrees that Arab failure is linked with the failure to criticize tradition, while Fazlur Rahman stresses the links between Islam and social progress. Islamic traditionalism is opposed to Islam itself, since the religion is in favour of economic and social development and change. The attempt to fix a rigid, stultified version of Islam as the ideal is to fail to grasp the ways in which science and technology can improve the life-style and moral welfare of the mass of the community. Zaki Najib Mahmud is not convinced that philosophy has much to contribute to this debate. Hasan Hanafi is one of the many contemporary Arab philosophers who use a novel philosophical technique, in his case phenomenology, to develop a traditional Islamic concept, that of tawhid, or unity. He suggests that Islam is dynamic enough to broaden this notion so that it can provide a generally acceptable principle of unity and equality for everyone. He is also critical of the idea of Western progress, sug- gesting that the West itself is now entering a period of decadence that will require an infusion of ideas from else- where, and in particular the East. The idea that Islam is based on fixed rules he finds unacceptable; it is based on a revelation appropriate at its own time and place, but now other interpretations of the message should be adopted to fit present conditions and represent more accurately the dynamism of Islam. It is often said that philosophy declined in the Islamic world after the death of Ibn Rushd in the twelfth century, but this is far from the truth. Today there is a lively philosophical presence in most of the Islamic world, often with the incorporation into Islamic philosophy of ideas like Logical Positivism, hermeneutics, pragmatism, Hegelian- ism, and so on. Philosophy continued very vigorously in the Persian cultural world, especially the philosophy of Ibn Sı¯na¯ and the Ishraqi (Illuminationist) thinkers developing and commenting on al-Sohravardı¯ and Molla¯ S . adra¯. In Iran philosophy has now moved away from the theological school, the madrasa, into the university, and a good example is provided by the thought of Mehdi Ha’iri Yazdı¯. He develops a complex theory of knowledge by presence, a form of knowledge which is incorrigible and which grounds our other knowledge claims using material from both Ishraqi thinkers like al-Sohravardı¯, and the modern philosopher Wittgenstein. ‘Ali Shariati uses the ishraqi school’s intermediary position between mysticism and Peripateticism to develop a view of the human being as having God at its essence while maintaining the scope to determine its own form of existence. The notion of unity (tawhid) is seen as therapeutic; it is desiged to estab- lish both personal and political justice and harmony. He interprets the main figures of Shı¯‘ite Islam as models for us not only in a personal sense but also to bring about more progressive social ideals; he sees them as fulfilling archetypes which have always been regarded as desirable. Over time the archetypes themselves have not changed essentially, but they have changed in appearance, to make them more suitable to the local audiences for whom they are designed. Islamic philosophy today 451 This link of the personal and the political is significant in modern Persian thought. It is well represented by Ayatol- lah Khomeini, who overthrew the Shah and became both the spiritual and the temporal ruler of the Islamic Repub- lic of Iran. He argued that religion does not just apply to private morality but must also be applied to the state as a whole, and the religious authorities should be in charge of the state, since only then will the community be rightly guided. The school of Qom, of which he was a member, contained also Muhammad Hossein Tabataba’i, Murtaza Mutahheri, and Muhammad Taqi Misbah Yazdi, all important religious Shı¯‘ite thinkers who none the less were far from suspicious of intellectual thought coming from the West. They argued that traditional Islamic philosophy can only gain by opening itself to some of the important philosophical achievements created outside the Islamic world. But they uniformly disapproved of the work of Abdul Soroush, who took a rather critical view of religion when he applied what he took to be the arguments of Popper, Moore, and Wittgenstein to them. Soroush was opposed by Sadiq Larijani, the chief representative of the school of Qom, who suggested that Soroush had misapplied the theories of Popper, Stalnaker, Watkins, and Hempel. It is interesting that the debate took the form not of religion as opposed to reason, but of what the correct philosophical view should be, and then how it should be applied to religion. Soroush upset not only the school of Qom, but also the supporters of Hei- degger, so he was quite isolated intellectually in Iran. Perhaps the best-known Iranian thinker outside the country is Seyyed Hossein Nasr. He is highly critical of Western science, praising some of its achievements but pointing to the ecological consequences of a world-view which does not acknowledge the presence of God at the centre of that view. Science without spirituality is without limits, since there is nothing which it holds sacred, and it bases itself entirely on measurements of quantities, not on the quality of existence. More spiritual philosophies are harmonious and integrative; they embed spiritual values in the technological agenda, and so make ecological disas- ters less likely. For him the question is not what the East should take from the West, but vice versa. Along with this view he has established in some detail the theoretical pre- suppositions of Sufism, the school of mysticism in Islamic thought, and his historical accounts of this doctrine have played a large role in its increasing domestication outside of the traditional Islamic world. o.l. L. Hahn et al. (eds.), The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Chicago, 2001). M. Ha’iri Yazdı¯, The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy: Knowledge by Presence (New York, 1992). S. H. Nasr and O. Leaman (eds.), History of Islamic Philosophy (London, 1996), chs. 61, 63, 64, 65, 69, 71. F. Rahman, Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition (Chicago, 1982). Italian philosophy. A self-consciously Italian philosophical tradition only developed in the nineteenth century with the growth of the movement for national unification. Since that time, Italian philosophy has been dominated by the rival schools of *idealism and *positivism, with the important Italian current of *Marxism drawing on both. However, each of these camps has laid claim to a native inheritance going back to the Renaissance, and their selective interpretations of their intellectual forebears still find an echo in some of the standard histories of Italian philosophy. The idealists traced a lineage from the Platonist *humanism of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola in the fif- teenth century, through the rationalist *pantheism of Bruno and the Baconian utopia of Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), to Vico and Vincenzo Cuoco (1770–1823) in the eighteenth century, which they assimilated to their own reading and critical elaboration of Kant and Hegel. The positivists went back to the more scientifically orien- tated Paduan followers of Aristotle, such as Pietro Pompanazzi (1462–1525), and found a line of descent that included the mechanistic *materialism and sensationalism of Bernardino Telesio (1509–88), Galileo, Machiavelli, and the social reformers of the Italian Enlightenment, such as Vico (who they also claimed), Antonio Genovesi (1712– 69), and Gaetano Filangeri (1752–88) in the south, and the Milanese group of Cesare Beccaria (1738–94), Melchiorre Gioja (1767–1829), and Gian Domenico Romagnosi (1765–1835), who were profoundly influenced in their turn by the *empiricism of Locke and Hume and the asso- ciationist and utilitarian doctrines of Helvétius, Condillac, and Bentham. One theme ran through both accounts that persists up to the present: the dialectical tension between the two Romes, between Pope and Emperor, the active and the contemplative life, social emancipation and heav- enly contemplation. The two main figures of the positivist school in the nineteenth century were Carlo Cattaneo (1801–69) and Roberto Ardigo (1828–1920). The first drew on the reformers of the Milanese Enlightenment, Vico and Comte, and urged the need for philosophy to adopt the methods of the natural sciences and develop into a social science. Ardigo, a former priest, became the apostle of a theistic Newtonianism, in which the same mechanistic ‘forces’ explained all physical and psychical phenomena. In the twentieth century, positivist thinking was continued by the Italian school of criminology, particularly Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) and Enrico Ferri (1846– 1929), historians and social scientists such as Pasquale Villari (1826–1917), some early Marxists, notably Achille Loria (1857–1943), and by the pioneering political sociolo- gists Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) and Gaetano Mosca (1858–1941). There were also a number of important philosophers of science within the empiricist tradition, notably Giovanni Vailati (1863–1909) and Mario Calderoni (1879–1914). Amongst the idealists, Antonio Rosmini-Serbati (1797–1855) and Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–52) mixed the Italian Neoplatonist tradition with *neo-Kantianism, attributing in different ways the activity of the Kantian categories of the understanding to our intuition of the divine 452 Islamic philosophy today Italian philosophy 453 being. During the revolutions of 1848 they placed their philosophies at the service of the Catholic-liberal supporters of Pius IX as a rival to the humanistic and democratic nationalism of Giuseppe Mazzini (1804–72), who identified God with the people, but were condemned by conser- vatives for heresy. Whilst their thinking was eclipsed in the north by the positivist tradition in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was critically elaborated and secu- larized by the southern group of Hegelian scholars, particularly Augusto Vera (1813–85), Bertrando Spaventa (1817–82), and Francesco De Sanctis (1817–82). They also sought to integrate the main currents of contemporary European philosophy with the Italian tradition. Spaventa argued that there had been a ‘circulation of European thought’ in which Italian philosophers had either pre- empted or independently conceived all the main elements of modern European philosophy, with the Platonists rep- resenting the rationalists and the Aristotelians the empiri- cists, and Campanella and Vico anticipating the resolution of these two schools in Kant and Hegel respectively. This tradition was continued by Croce and Gentile, who both evolved explicitly historicist doctrines and whose ideas dominated Italian philosophy in the early twentieth century. Gentile became the official philosopher of *fascism, and the idealist school also had by far the greatest influence on Italian Marxism, Antonio Labriola (1843–1904) being a pupil of Spaventa’s and Gramsci a sympathetic critic of Croce, although an important positivist strand also existed, of which Galvano della Volpe (1895–1968) and Colletti were the main exponents. Whilst some contemporary philosophers have carried on the positivist tradition, such as Bobbio in law and politics and Ludovico Geymonat (1908–91) in the philosophy of science, most Italian philosophers, such as the existen- tialists Niccola Abbagnano (1901–90) and Luigi Pareyson (1918– ) and the post-modernist Vattimo, remain original reworkers of the German philosophic tradition, although their attention has shifted from Kant and Hegel to Nietszche, Husserl, Jaspers, and Heidegger. r.p.b. Richard Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory (Cambridge, 1987). J. H. Randall, The Career of Philosophy (New York, 1962). Guido de Ruggiero, Modern Philosophy (London, 1921). Jackson, Frank (1943– ). Australian philosopher of mind, logic, and metaphysics who is noted for his adherence to a *representative theory of perception and for his work on *conditionals. Jackson is unusual amongst contemporary philosophers in defending the existence of *sense-data, arguing that an adequate account of the truth-conditions of statements about how things ‘look’ or otherwise ‘appear’ to us phenomenally requires us to admit reference to such items. In his 1986 essay ‘What Mary Didn’t Know’ he introduced a now-famous thought experiment about knowledge gained through phenomenal experience. Jackson’s work on conditionals builds upon Grice’s theory of the indicative conditional as a statement whose truth-condition is that of the so-called material conditional, making ‘If p, then q’ true if and only if ‘Not both p and not-q’ is true. In order to defuse apparent counter- examples to this in natural language, Jackson gives an account of the assertibility-conditions of conditionals which explains why we do not always assert a conditional whose truth-condition we believe to be satisfied. e.j.l. *Mary, black and white. F. Jackson, Conditionals (Oxford, 1987). —— From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (Oxford, 1997). —— Mind, Method, and Conditionals: Selected Essays (London, 1998). Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich (1743–1819), German pietist philosopher of ‘faith and feeling’. He was the sharpest of the critics of the intellectualistic German *Enlightenment, represented chiefly by Wolff and Kant. His philosophy and character were important in moving German philosophy and literature to a somewhat mystical and Romantic Weltanschauung. From Hume’s scepticism Jacobi inferred the inadequacy of abstract systematic thought and the practical necessity of irrational belief (David Hume über den Glauben (1787)). The use of pure reason in philosophy, he held, leads inevitably to Spinozism (then almost universally condemned as pantheism and fatalism). By revealing that Less- ing shortly before his death had confessed to being a Spinozist, Jacobi caused a great scandal in making such an injurious charge against the universally admired Lessing, and precipitated the so-called Pantheismusstreit between himself and another anti-Spinozist who was Lessing’s best friend, Moses Mendelssohn. The Streit was carried on in books, articles, and personal correspondence circulated and published without permission. Each participant was egged on by friends and disciples, and the ensuing quarrel was not an edifying spectacle. Mendelssohn’s death in 1786 at the height of the dispute prompted allegations that Jacobi had caused it; these slanderous charges exacerbated the quarrel and gave it an emotional depth and a personal drama in which nothing less than the legitimacy of the entire Enlightenment was at stake. Hamann, Herder, Goethe, and Kant were soon involved in the battle. Jacobi and Mendelssohn agreed that pure reason is not a sufficient instrument for metaphysics and that to avoid the abyss of Spinozism something else is needed: for Jacobi it was an act of faith (salto mortale, he called it), for Mendelssohn it was common sense. Each party appealed to the practical (i.e. the moral) aspect of Kant’s philosophy. Seeing both participants in the controversy as enemies of reason, ‘the touchstone of truth’, Kant in What is Orientation in Thinking? (1786) rejected both of the opposing views. Jacobi was one of the most effective of Kant’s critics, famous even in the twentieth century for his epigram ‘Without the *thing-in-itself I cannot enter the Kantian philosophy, and with it I cannot remain’. l.w.b. Lewis White Beck, ch. 1 in The Routledge History of Philosophy, vol. vi, ed. R. C. Solomon and Kathleen Higgins (London, 1993). Frederick C. Beiser, The Faith of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), chs. 2, 3, and 4. The Spinoza Conversations between Lessing and Jacobi, tr. G. Vallé, J. B. Lawson, and C. G. Chappel (Canham, Md., 1988). Jainism. Atheistic school of *Indian philosophy much older than Buddhism (dating back to the eighth century bc) and still alive. The ethical principle of non-violence is taken by Jainism to an extreme in both practice and theory. To make peace among the endlessly disputing schools of Indian philosophy, Jaina philosophers made the metatheoretic move of non-exclusivism, which is spelt out as a seven-valued logic, illustrated as follows: (1) From one perspective, the self is permanent. (2) From another, it is not. J (3) From a joint perspective, it is and is not so (succes- sively). (4) From a neutral one, it is indescribable. Adding the combinations of each of 1, 2, and 3 with 4, you get seven theses, each of which is objectively correct in that it confesses its own conditionality. Jainism accepts the notion of eternal souls which assume the form of a human body and are repeatedly reborn until they are liberated from pleasurable and painful effects of egoistic actions called *karma. Jaina logicians affirmed the existence of the external world, impugning Buddhist idealism. a.c. *Buddhist philosophy; atheism and agnosticism. B. K. Matilal, The Central Philosophy of Jainism (Ahmedabad, 1981). James, William (1842–1910). American philosopher and psychologist, son of Henry James the Swedenborgian religious thinker, brother of Henry James the novelist, and Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at Harvard. Only some of his many concerns can be considered. 1. The Principles of Psychology (1890) is officially com- mitted to the scientific study of mind, conceived as the ascertainment of ‘the empirical correlation of the various sorts of thought or feeling with definite conditions of the brain’. Although ostensibly avoiding metaphysics, much of it is as philosophical as psychological. Avoiding metaphysics means mainly assuming the existence of a physical world independent of mind, ignoring any philosophical case against this scientifically necessary presupposition. Four themes call for notice here. (i) For James mind is identified with *consciousness, known primarily through *introspection; scientific psychology explores its physical basis and biological function. This is evidently to assist the organism to cope with its environment more flexibly than can inherited behav- ioural patterns. The criterion for the presence of mind is, therefore, the occurrence of behaviour which reaches the same goal, as circumstances alter, through differing means. James thinks it unlikely that such behaviour could ever be explained mechanistically. While consciousness is too obviously a distinct reality in his eyes for anything like the brain–mind *identity theories of today even to be considered, James carefully examines the automaton theory (*epiphenomenalism) but dismisses it (with debatable logic) as failing to explain why consciousness has been picked out for development by natural selection. (James was strongly influenced by Darwinian ideas.) The old- fashioned idea of a distinct soul is better, but James’s own view is rather that ‘the stream of consciousness’ is gener- ated afresh each moment by the current state of the whole brain and reacts back on it, and hence on behaviour, with a modicum of free spontaneity (a view anticipative of the positions of both Whitehead and Roger Sperry). (ii) This notion of the *stream of consciousness (or thought) is the most famous theme in The Principles of Psychology. Among its varied heirs are stream-of- consciousness literature (e.g. Gertrude Stein), aspects of Husserlian phenomenology, and Whiteheadian process thought. Consciousness comes in a continuous flow without sharp breaks or clearly distinguishable components. Thus experience is always of a specious present, a stretch of sensible duration in which the just-past still figures along with the dawning of the future. As against traditional *empiricism, for which a state of consciousness is a complex of individually repeatable impressions and ideas, James contends that no item of consciousness is ever exactly repeated. I may perceive or think of the same thing twice but never by way of numerically or qualitatively identical representations. (iii) James distinguishes between the I and the Me. The I is the ultimate thinker, the Me is the object of all those concerns we call selfish and which the I and its organism primarily seek to preserve. The Me divides into the material me, my body and my possessions; the social Me (or Mes), the image (or images) I present to the various communities to which I belong; and the spiritual Me, which covers both my mental capacities and achievements, and some supposed inner source thereof. As for the ultimate I, which does the thinking, James, having dismissed a permanent ego, decides that (if there is such a thing at all and not simply each total conscious state in turn) it is the momentary thinker of the total present thought. Personal identity through time consists in the fact that the I of one moment adopts the Mes and Is of earlier times by the peculiarly warm and intimate way in which it recollects them. ( James pays particular attention to cases of multiple personality in developing his account.) (iv) The subject of *free will was of immense emotional significance to James. He was rescued from a phase of serious psychological depression in 1879 partly by discovering Charles Renouvier’s defence of free will as ‘the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts’. This is James’s own view. Consciousness cannot determine what ideas are presented to it but, by effort- ful selective direction of attention, can decide which will affect behaviour. This power can neither be proved nor disproved scientifically, but belief in it is a legitimate exer- cise of ‘the will to believe’. James’s naturalistic approach (and his role at Harvard) contributed significantly to the development of experi- mental psychology in America (though he had no love of experiment himself ); his treatment of the various types of self has had an influence on social psychology; and his introspectionist investigations enormously influenced Husserlian *phenomenology and its offshoots. It should be noted that though James rejects materialism, in any ordinary sense, he does take what might be called a phe- nomenological materialist view of many mental processes, seeing them as the consciousness of physical states, as in the *James– Lange theory of the emotions or his replacement of the Kantian ‘I think’ as the constant in experience by the ‘I breathe’. James, William 455 2. The best known of James’s purely philosophical works is Pragmatism (1908). James takes over from C. S. Peirce the idea that the meaning of a concept lies in its practical bearings but puts it to different (not necessarily worse) uses. Truth, for James’s *pragmatism, consists in useful ideas. Their utility may lie in either the power to predict experience they confer or their encouragement of valuable emotion and behaviour. Obvious objections to this appear less strong when it is realized that James’s account incorporates what is currently called an external- ist critique of inherent intentionality (sometimes expressed as the rejection of the very idea of consciousness as opposed to experience). Thus an idea (qua piece of ‘flat’ experience) is only about something to the extent that it produces behaviour fitted to deal with it if it exists, and is true only if it does so. (Thus my belief that God exists requires a God it helps me deal with to be true.) This was a response to his colleague Royce, who claimed that only through the mediation of a divine mind can thought be linked to definite external objects and thus enabled James to avoid the absolute idealism to which he had previously felt unwillingly forced. Actually James’s pragmatic account of truth is the fulfilment of a variety of strands in his prior thought and takes somewhat different forms according to which is uppermost. Among these are Peirce’s operationalism, Royce’s account of intentionality, and his own doctrine of the will to believe. 3. James’s other chief philosophical doctrine is radical empiricism, the view that the ultimate stuff of reality (or at least all knowable reality) is pure experience. When the natures or qualia which compose this occur in one kind of arrangement they constitute minds, when in another, physical things. (The clash with the earlier denial of repeatable components of consciousness is modified in his final pluralistic metaphysics.) This relates to pragmatism because knowledge is conceived as the way in which the experience composing a mind leads it to successful negoti- ation with experience beyond itself (whether in a physical or a mental arrangement). In Essays in Radical Empiricism (a posthumous collection of 1904–5 articles) James oscil- lates between various radical empiricist accounts of the physical world, a phenomenalist view for which the physical consists in possible experience, a ‘new realist’ position for which it consists in sensory vistas only some of them in minds, and the panpsychist view that the physical consists in its own inner experience of itself. Upon the whole he seems to have thought the last the final metaphysical truth and the second the best analysis of our ordinary conception of things. 4. An inherited concern with religious issues was central to James’s thought throughout his life. The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) studies the phenomena of mysticism and *religious experience with a view to an eventual empirical assessment of their validity, a concern which also led to James’s substantial involvement in psychical research, while later works, such as A Pluralist Uni- verse (1909), after sharply attacking the metaphysical *monism of absolute idealists like Royce and Bradley, develop a mystical pluralistic metaphysics in which a ‘finite God’, or more interestingly a ‘mother sea of consciousness’, plays some of the roles of an infinite God or Absolute, while leaving us an independence we are refused by monism, and avoiding the apology for evil which it, along with orthodox *theism, imposes. Death prevented the completion of a final working-out of his metaphysics, but Some Problems of Philosophy (1911), which particularly focuses on the nature of relations and continuity, taken with other works, sufficiently exhibits its main outlines. 5. In these later works James allied himself with Henri Bergson in arguing that conceptual thought cannot do proper justice to reality. This arises largely from the fact that concepts can only provide a static picture of a world which is essentially dynamic. (It was partly by exploiting this, he argued, that absolute idealists promoted their specious claim that the familiar world of contingency and change is somehow unreal, and that Reality proper consists in a static *Absolute.) This is all right so long as that static picture is used to guide our dynamic dealings with things, but it leads to trouble when we expect it to provide a real grasp of the nature of its object. James’s treatment of the limitations of conceptual thought is related to his pragmatic conception of truth in a somewhat curious manner. *Truth, he argued, as a pragmatist, is no mere copy of reality in another conceptual or verbal medium. There would be little point in it if it were, and we should regard the conceptual symbols in which it consists rather as tools for dealing with (and perhaps sometimes as a worthwhile addition to) reality than as revelations of its essence. None the less, James did hanker for something which could provide a sense of the real essence of things and, since concepts and truth were precluded from this role, it had to be sought in a metaphysics which turns us towards reality in some more intimate way than they do. And here the standard logic by which we organize our concepts is more an obstacle than an aid. We should not look for a revelation of reality from what are merely tools for dealing with it but must do so by sinking ourselves perceptually in the flux and be prepared to give an account of a world in process which will capture something of its essence even if conceptually it contains some apparent contradictions. The specific upshot of these reflections is, in effect, a process philosophy, incorporating an ‘epochal’ view of time, not unlike that later developed by Whitehead and Hartshorne (who, however, aimed to put into satisfactory concepts what James thought could not be adequately conceptualized). t.l.s.s. A. J. Ayer, The Origins of Pragmatism: Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James (London, 1968). Part 2 on James. Graham Bird, William James (London, 1986). Marcus Ford, William James’s Philosophy: A New Perspective (Amherst, Mass., 1982). Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy (New Haven, Conn., 1977), pt. 3. Gerald Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven, Conn., 1986). 456 James, William R. A. Putnam (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to William James (Cambridge, 1997). T. L. S. Sprigge, James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality (La Salle, Ill., 1993). James–Lange theory of the emotions. Independently advanced by Carl G. Lange in 1885 and by William James in 1884, it holds that an emotion is the experience of an appropriate physical response to external stimuli. Sadness and anger don’t make us cry and strike, rather they are the feeling of doing so. Typical of a note of ‘phenomeno- logical materialism’ in James, like his substitution of the ‘I breathe’, as the accompaniment of all consciousness, for the ‘I think’. t.l.s.s. Jansenism. This movement in seventeenth-century French Catholic thought is named after the Fleming Cor- nelius Otto Jansen (1585–1638), whose treatise Augustinus inspired it. Jansenists held that it is impossible to do good works without God’s grace and that this grace is irre- sistible. They adopted a rigoristic position in Christian ethics and criticized their Jesuit opponents for moral laxity. Pascal, who was influenced by and sympathetic to Jansenism, satirized the moral reasoning of its opponents in his Lettres provinciales. p.l.q. N. Abercrombie, The Origins of Jansenism (Oxford, 1936). Japanese philosophy. The first thing to be said about Japanese philosophy is that it does indeed exist. If philosophy is understood as ‘thinking about the fundamental structures and meaning of human existence in the world’, it has been practised in Japan for well over a thousand years. But the most striking feature of Japanese philosophy is its distinctly multiple heritage, drawing as it does from a variety of Indian, Chinese, indigenous, and—even- tually—Western sources. Also, compared with most European philosophies, East Asian thinking tends to focus on particular, concrete issues, and is correspondingly uninterested in abstract speculation. A few initial remarks—of necessity quite general—may help to orientate the reader to the very different kind of thinking that one finds in the Japanese tradition. Many of the philosophical categories that seem natural in the West are simply not found in East Asian thought. This is in part a function of the structures of the Chinese and Japanese languages, which are quite different from the subject– predicate structure of languages in the Indo-European family. In Chinese, words that would for us be substan- tives function more as verbs, corresponding to an experience of the world as dynamic process rather than as substance; and in Japanese, so much emphasis is placed on the predicate that the subject is usually omitted alto- gether, while there are two verbs for ‘is–exists’—neither of which is used for the copula. There are also considerable differences in philosophical rhetoric and style. In a culture that prizes allusive under- statement and subtle indirectness in human intercourse, forcefully to advance arguments in terms of clear and distinct ideas—let alone to attack or defend a philosophical position—would be considered boorish to the point of barbarism. In addition, the ways relative clauses function in Japanese make for even more indeterminacy. But what to the Western student of philosophy might seem impossibly vague may appear to the Japanese reader a pregnant play of multiple meanings that reflects the actual complexities of experience. In general, the line between philosophy and literature is less clearly drawn than in the West. Most of the dualisms on which Western philosophy tends to be predicated—the intelligible as opposed to the sensible realm, the divine in contrast to the human, culture versus nature, mind (or spirit) in opposition to body (or matter), the logical and rational versus the aesthetic and intuitive—are not prominent in East Asian thinking. And since Japanese philosophy tends to be firmly grounded in practice, reading and reflection are best sup- plemented by engaging in (or at least observing) the rele- vant practices—going to Japanese theatre, studying Japanese literature, sitting or walking in *Zen meditation, practising Japanese arts (whether martial or fine), watch- ing Japanese films, visiting Japanese gardens, or even eating in traditional Japanese restaurants. A major reason for the late start of philosophical thinking in Japan was that the indigenous language lacked a system of writing. When the Japanese began ‘importing’ Chinese culture around the fifth century, one of the first things they took over was the ideographic system of writ- ten Chinese. Three major philosophies were embodied in the texts that were brought from China over the next few hundred years: *Confucian, *Taoist, and *Buddhist thought, all of which—together with the indigenous religious world-view of Shinto—shaped the subsequent development of Japanese thought. A major figure in the introduction of Chinese and Indian culture to Japan was Ku¯kai (774–835), founder of an esoteric school of Bud- dhism deriving from Indian tantrism. Like many great Japanese thinkers, Ku¯kai was a man of many talents and a paradigm of the religious thinker who is simultaneously beyond the everyday world and fully engaged in it. He thus exemplifies two general traits of Japanese philosophy: it has a strong religious component, while being inherently embodied in practice. Several centuries later, two other philosophically fertile schools of Buddhism came to prominence, the first being the ‘Pure Land’ Buddhism founded by Ho¯nen (1133–1212) and his disciple Shinran (1173–1262). The other was Zen, which grew out of Chan Buddhism in China. The intro- ducers into Japan of the two major Zen schools were Eisai (1141–1215) for the Rinzai school and Do¯gen (1200–53) for the So¯to¯ school. Of all the philosophies developed in Japan, Zen has had the broadest cultural impact. During the medieval period it profoundly informed the evolution of such arts as poetry and Noh drama, architecture and landscape gardening, calligraphy and painting, the tea cere- mony and flower arrangement, as well as swordsmanship, archery, and other martial arts. Japanese philosophy 457 Two figures from the Rinzai school deserve mention as exemplifying the fusion of Zen thought with practice. Takuan So¯ho¯ (1573–1645) was a prolific author whose more speculative works attempted a synthesis of Zen thinking with neo-Confucian metaphysics, but who is best known for his writings on the art of the Zen sword. Takuan explicated the Zen doctrine of ‘no mind’ by show- ing how, in combat, focusing the mind on any one place, or letting it ‘stop’ anywhere, leads to disaster; one must rather let one’s awareness diffuse through the entire body and beyond, so as to allow immediate response from any part. This schema—in which rigorous psychophysical practice carried out over decades leads to an enlightened spontaneity that is even more rapid and attuned than instinctual responses—is typical of the Zen discipline that underlies practice in meditation and the arts. Two later Zen masters were responsible for a revitalization and efflorescence of the Rinzai school during the Tokugawa period, Bankei Yo¯taku (1622–93) and Hakuin Ekaku (1685–1768). Like Takuan, Hakuin was a man of multiple talents and is highly regarded as a poet, a painter and cal- ligrapher, and a thinker of the first rank. For the Rinzai school Zen practice is a matter of ‘seeing into one’s own true nature’, which is basically already enlightened. Hakuin emphasizes that genuine practice consists in ‘uninterrupted meditation in the midst of all activities’ rather than the ‘dead sitting and silent illumination’ advo- cated by the quietistic schools. (There is a remarkable simi- larity between Hakuin’s style of writing and Nietzsche’s, as well as between many of their ideas—especially about the role of the emotions in the best human life.) Towards the end of the Tokugawa period a movement arose in reaction to the dominance of Buddhist and Con- fucian thinking in Japanese philosophy that came to be known as the Kokugaku (‘national learning’) school, the primary figures in which were Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) and Hirata Atsune (1776–1843). While recep- tive to the neo-Confucian Kogaku thinkers’ emphasis on the earliest classical texts, these men called for a return to the study of Japanese antiquity. Through a philosophical reconstruction of Shinto and careful study of the early classics of Japanese myth and literature, they sought to recover the ‘true heart’ of ancient Japan as a basis for spiritual renewal in the present. While the Kokugaku philosophies are impressive in their philological sophistication, the exclusiveness of their concern with ‘pure Japanese- ness’—while understandable in view of the multiple heritage of Japanese culture—tends toward a vehement nationalism. Upon the reopening of the country to the West with the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the Japanese embarked upon a comprehensive programme of ‘adopting and adapting’ Western philosophies. Around the turn of the century, thorough engagements with the full historical sweep of Western philosophy were complemented by special studies of British *utilitarianism, American *pragmatism, French *positivism, and—above all *German philosophy from Leibniz and Kant, through Hegel and Fichte and Schelling, to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The first mas- terpiece to emerge from the ferment that resulted from this confluence of the Asian and Western philosophical traditions was An Inquiry into the Good (1911) by Nishida Kitaro¯ (1870–1945), an epochal work that sought to articu- late an original philosophy rooted in the tradition of East Asian thought by way of concepts derived from Western philosophy. Over the next thirty years Nishida went on to elaborate a vast and complex body of thought ranging over metaphysics and epistemology, ethics and aesthetics, and philosophy of politics and religion. Nishida influenced a whole generation of younger philosophers, many of whom also taught at Kyoto Uni- versity and came to be known collectively as the Kyoto School. The thought of these men was often influenced by religious existentialism and always informed by thorough study of the history of Western philosophy. Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962), much influenced by Hegel, wrote extensively in the fields of ethics and phenomenology and philosophy of religion from the perspective of Pure Land Buddhism, while his younger contemporary Nishitani Keiji (1900–90), more influenced by Nietzsche, wrote from a more existential standpoint conditioned by Zen. Watsuji Tetsuro¯ (1889–1960) began his writing career with insightful studies of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, and went on to publish prolifically on Bud- dhism, Confucianism, the philosophy of the visual and theatrical arts, and especially ethics. Several of the major figures in the Kyoto School came in for severe criticism from their Marxist colleagues— among whom the most impressive thinker was Tosaka Jun (1900–45)—for publishing material during the Second World War that was distinctly nationalistic and right- wing in tone. The political writings of these thinkers deserve close attention, since they open some fascinating perspectives on the difficult question concerning the relations between a thinker’s politics and his or her philosophy. Unfortunately, much of the recent commentary on these issues in the United States has come from post- Marxist Japanologists so ready to point the accusing finger from positions of ethical superiority that ideological complacency has tended to take the place of responsible scholarship in this area. Three other thinkers of the period deserve mention. Hatano Seiichi (1877–1950) is distinguished by being a practising Christian and by his broad competence in the history of Western philosophy with special emphasis on the Greeks and philosophy of religion. Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945) was an existential humanist, strongly influenced by Marxism for a time, who produced important works in the fields of social and political philosophy and philosophical anthropology. Kuki Shu¯zo¯ (1888–1943) was a cosmopolitan aristocrat who spent the 1920s studying in Europe, where he made a great impression on both Hei- degger and Sartre among others. While he is best known for his subtle work on the aesthetics of Japanese taste, Iki no ko¯zo¯ (The Structure of ‘Iki’ (1930)), Kuki wrote with great sophistication in the fields of existential philosophy, 458 Japanese philosophy literary theory, and modern French thought. He was also an accomplished poet who wrote numerous belletristic essays. At the close of the twentieth century, number of philosophers (such as Abe Masao, Takeuchi Yoshinori, Tsujimura Ko¯ichi, and Ueda Shizuteru) were carrying on the work of the Kyoto School, while their counterparts in Tokyo (Nakamura Hajime and Yuasa Yasuo) were focusing more on historical issues, especially with regard to Buddhism. An exciting feature of current philosophy in Japan is the dialogue being initiated by syntheses of contemporary Western thought with the Japanese philosophical tradition by such thinkers as Sakabe Megumi in Tokyo and Ohashi Ryo¯suke in Kyoto. g.r.p. *Buddhist philosophy; Chinese philosophy; Indian philosophy. David A. Dilworth and Valdo H. Viglielmo with Agustin Jacinto Zavala (eds. and tr.), Sourcebook for Modern Japanese Philosophy: Selected Documents (London, 1998). James W. Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School (Honolulu, 2001). Thomas P. Kasulis, Zen Action/Zen Person (Honolulu, 1981). Michael Marra (ed. and tr.), A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics (Honolulu, 2001). Graham Parkes, ‘Ways of Japanese Thinking’, in Nancy G. Hume (ed.), Japanese Aesthetics and Culture (Albany, NY, 1995). —— ‘The Putative Fascism of the Kyoto School and the Political Correctness of the Modern Academy’, Philosophy East and West, 47/3 (1997). Jaspers, Karl (1883–1969). German philosopher, who was one of the founders of *existentialism. Originally a psych- iatrist, his first book was General Psychopathology (1913). Die Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919) marked his transi- tion to philosophy. It presented a typology of world- views, and also introduced his philosophy of Existenz, which he elaborated in Philosophy (1932; tr. Chicago, 1967–71) and other works. The great philosophical systems have collapsed, since men are essentially limited, conditioned and uncertain. We must learn from philosophers, such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who accept and probe human finitude. Only three ways of philosophizing are now open to us: to explore (1) the limits of science (world-orientation), (2) the self, and (3) what transcends world and self. World, soul, and God are the three ‘encompassers’, within whose ‘horizons’ we know every- thing we know: we cannot ascend to the supreme encom- passer of these horizons, e.g. to Heidegger’s ‘being’. 1. Science has only relative, not absolute, truth. It serves for the manipulation of measurable objects, but gives no answers to the crucial questions of life and death. Between the four spheres of reality—matter, life, soul, spirit—there are gaps which science will never succeed in filling. 2. The self is Existenz: it has no fixed nature, but is its pos- sibilities, what it can become. It exists only in ‘communica- tion’ with other existences. It acts not only within the routines and rituals of everyday life, but sometimes ‘uncon- ditionally’, with a freedom amounting to the ‘choice of itself’. Its condition is starkly revealed in ‘limit-situations’, such as death, suffering, conflict, and guilt, requiring deci- sions perplexed by uncertainty and antinomy. 3. World and Existenz point to the transcendent. This is discernible in the ‘ciphers’ presented by experience and tradition. One such cipher is the law of the day and the pas- sion of the night, the perennial conflict between orderly reason and destructive unreason. Another is the pervasive defeat of human aspirations. ‘Failure is ultimate’, but to philosophize is ‘to learn to die’ and ‘to encounter being by means of failure’. m.j.i. M. Dufrenne and P. Ricœur, Karl Jaspers et la Philosophie de l’existence (Paris, 1947). H. Ehrlich and R. Wisser (eds.), Karl Jaspers Today (Washington DC, 1988). P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (La Salle, Ill., 1957). jaundice. Favourite philosophical example of how the state of observers can affect their *perception; used from Lucretius and Sextus Empiricus, through Berkeley, and into the twentieth century. ‘In the jaundice, every one knows that all things seem yellow’ (Berkeley, Three Dia- logues, i). In sceptics’ hands this was used to show that (since there was nothing to choose between the jaundiced eye and the unjaundiced eye) we cannot ascribe to an object a ‘true colour’. For other philosophers, the example shows only that, while objects have colours (which in good circumstances are seen by people with good eye- sight in good health), a white thing will in particular circumstances look yellow and a person may even mistakenly take it to be that colour. The example may itself be an instance of mistake. It has been remarked that in jaundice it is the sufferer who looks yellow to the world, not the world that looks yellow to the sufferer. j.bro. *illusion. J. Annas and J. Barnes, The Modes of Scepticism (Cambridge, 1985), ch. 4. Jefferson, Thomas (1743–1826). Statesman (third Presi- dent of the United States) and political theorist, author of the Declaration of Independence and the (1779) Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (state of Virginia), among other political and philosophical documents. Jefferson’s general philosophical outlook was empiricist and materialist, his religious convictions were deist, and his political opinions were grounded in Lockean social *contract theory. His vision of representative *democracy required an educated and self-sufficient populace, and he insisted that free public education, together with the recognition that no generation’s political consent could bind another’s, would promote in the new nation the ‘natural aristocracy’ of ‘virtue and talents’, eliminating the ‘artificial aristocracy’ of ‘wealth and birth’. k.h. Morton White, The Philosophy of the American Revolution (New York, 1978). Jefferson, Thomas 459 . activity of the Kantian categories of the understanding to our intuition of the divine 452 Islamic philosophy today Italian philosophy 453 being. During the revolutions of 1 848 they placed their philosophies. urged the need for philosophy to adopt the methods of the natural sciences and develop into a social science. Ardigo, a former priest, became the apostle of a theistic Newtonianism, in which the. well as between many of their ideas—especially about the role of the emotions in the best human life.) Towards the end of the Tokugawa period a movement arose in reaction to the dominance of Buddhist

Định dạng
Số trang	10
Dung lượng	659,36 KB