The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 50 pps

Since these requirements hold for all subjects, the liking for the beautiful may be required of everyone. The second part of the third Critique is concerned with teleological judgement, particularly its role in biology. It also includes a lengthy appendix, however, in which Kant articulates his views on the relationship between tele- ology, theology, and morality and sketches his philosophy of history, together with his views on culture and its relation to the moral development of the human race. Thus, taken as a whole, the Critique of Judgement is an extremely rich and important, if frequently perplexing, work, which exhibits virtually the full range of Kant’s interests as a philosopher. h.e.a. *Kantianism; neo-Kantianism; transcendental deduc- tion. H. E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven, Conn., 1983). E. Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought (New Haven, Conn., 1981). P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge, 1992). O. Höffe, Immanuel Kant (Albany, NY, 1994). S. Körner, Kant (Harmondsworth, 1955). M. Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge, 2001). R. C. S. Walker, Kant (London, 1978). Kantian ethics. Ethical theories which have their origins in, or are constructively influenced by, the moral philosophy of Kant. Kant’s outstanding contribution to moral philosophy was to develop with great complexity the thesis that moral judgements are expressions of practical as distinct from theoretical reason. For Kant *practical reason, or the ‘rational will’, does not derive its principles of action by examples from the senses or from theoretical reason; it somehow finds its principles within its own rational nature. The ability to use practical reason to generate principles of conduct Kant calls ‘the *autonomy of the will’, and Kant sees it as constituting the dignity of a person. It is this conception of the autonomous will which is the main source of the several sorts of theory which might reasonably be called ‘Kantian ethics’. One sort of Kantian ethics is developed by those who are influenced by Kant’s view of the nature of the principles which are generated by the autonomous will. Kant argues that willing is truly autonomous if but only if the principles which we will are capable of being made universal laws. Such principles give rise to *‘categorical imperatives’, or duties binding unconditionally, as distinct from hypothetical imperatives, or commands of reason binding in certain conditions, such as that we have desires for certain ends. Kant seems to hold that *universalizability is both necessary and sufficient for moral rightness. This thesis has been much criticized, and those espousing Kantian ethics, as distinct from Kant’s own position, generally argue more moderately that universalizability is necessary but not sufficient for moral rightness. This is the position of R. M. Hare and the theory of *‘prescriptivism’ of which he has been the outstanding proponent. The position is ‘Kantian’ in that it makes central one version of the universalizability thesis, but it departs from Kant in important ways, such as making room for utilitarian considerations. Kant argues, as we have seen, that it is in virtue of their autonomous wills that persons have dignity or are ‘ends in themselves’. Combining this aspect of the autonomous will with the idea of universalizability, Kant arrives at the ideal of the kingdom of ends in themselves, or of people respecting each other’s universalizing wills. This has been an enormously influential idea, and its most distinguished recent exponent has been John Rawls, who accepts the core Kantian idea of mutually respecting autonomous rational wills, but adds to it ideas of his own to constitute the basis of his theory of justice. It is a nice point in many given cases when a theory is simply influenced by Kantian ethics, as distinct from being an example of Kantian ethics. An Existentialist such as Jean- Paul Sartre would not be happy with the idea that he was offering a version of Kantian ethics, but there is no doubt that he is greatly influenced by Kant. In Sartre (as in Nietz- sche before him) Kant’s autonomous will, free but con- strained by its essentially rational nature, becomes the totally unconstrained will creating its own values in arbi- trarily free choice. This is clearly a Kantian idea in origin but developed in a way which Kant would have repudiated. To stress that these are just a few of the many examples of Kant’s influence on ethics is to acknowledge his great- ness as a moral philosopher. r.s.d. *moral philosophy, the history of; histories of moral philosophy. R. M. Hare, ‘Universal Prescriptivism’, in Peter Singer (ed.), A Companion to Ethics (Oxford, 1991). I. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, tr. H. J. Paton as The Moral Law (London, 1953). Onora O’Neill, ‘Kantian Ethics’ in Peter Singer (ed.), A Companion to Ethics (Oxford, 1991). John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, 1972). Kantianism covers any philosophical view which derives from, or echoes, the central tenets of Kant’s critical philosophy. After the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 that philosophy had an impact that was both immediate and enduring, and few Western philosophers have been able to escape its influence. There is evidently a direct line of descent among German philosophers from Kant through Fichte and Hegel, past Schelling, Schopen- hauer, and neo-Kantians such as Hermann Cohen and Natorp, to Husserl and Heidegger. These philosophers mostly incorporated part of Kant’s teaching into their own philosophies, though they rarely endorsed everything that Kant said and were often, like Hegel and Heidegger, deeply critical of Kant’s own position. Nor, of course, did they all agree in their interpretations of Kant. Kant’s influence in the Anglo-Saxon world has been more variable. In the earliest days De Quincey, in Black- wood’s Magazine, took the view that Kant’s personal life was more interesting than his philosophy—a view that 470 Kant, Immanuel would now be regarded as odd to the point of perversity. Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophyquotes James Mill’s patronizing judgement ‘I see clearly enough what poor Kant would be at’, and explicitly dissented from the view that Kant was the greatest of modern philosophers. The American Pragmatists acknowledged the influence that Kant had on them by linking their own term *‘Pragmatism’ with what Kant had said in the Transcen- dental Dialectic of ‘pragmatic belief’ (Critique of Pure Rea- son, B 852). Charles Peirce adopted a strongly Kantian account of categories, but William James rejected what he understood of Kant’s *‘transcendentalism’, and urged that the right way to deal with Kant was to go round him rather than through him. And yet, despite this catalogue of hos- tility and incomprehension, Kant has constructively influenced many recent analytic philosophers from Wittgenstein to Strawson and Putnam. Nowadays few philosophers in this tradition resist a token reference to Kant, even though their views could not be regarded as Kantian. Davidson’s *‘anomalous monism’, for example, was constructed in part with a conscious reference to Kant’s treatment of the conflict between free will and causality. Two central features of Kant’s critical philosophy serve to define Kantianism. First is the fundamental reference to what Kant calls ‘transcendental apperception’, and especially to that aspect of it which covers personal identity and self-consciousness. Second is the reference to a transcendental method which Kant conceived as a revolutionary way of resolving the endless conflicts in the philosophical tradition from the Greeks to David Hume. Both aspects are complex, and ramify prolifically through Kant’s own writing and that of his Kantian successors. Transcendental apperception, for example, covers for Kant not only the central datum of self- consciousness, but also the a priori network of *categories through which an objective experience is made possible. In its purely personal aspect it defines various conceptions of transcendental idealism, from the extreme subjectivity of Fichte’s notion of the ‘ego’ to Strawson’s account of the concept of a ‘person’ as primitive. It has additionally a vital link through Kant’s conception of transcendental freedom to the notions of personal agency, responsibility, and the moral law. Most of the German philosophers influenced by Kant, from Fichte to Husserl and Heidegger, recognized some notion of the self as the hinge about which the critical philosophy revolved. Many of them, like Fichte himself and Schopenhauer, regarded that notion as one with a primary moral significance. In more recent times, through a simple contrast between *Utilitarianism and Kantianism in moral philosophy, this aspect of Kant’s view has been associated with a non-consequentialist conception of the intrinsic moral character of acts. The second feature, Kant’s transcendentalism, is also complex and variously interpreted. It covers the ground from a tacit appeal to supernatural, or supersensible, entities which Kant called *‘noumena’ or *‘things-in-themselves’, to a purported new form of logic, a transcendental logic, with a claimed revolutionary application to traditional philosophical issues. The former context might be further divided into a positive acceptance of such things in themselves, especially in relation to the transcendental self, and a negative rejection of any genuine knowledge of such supersensible entities. It was the negative aspect which led Schopenhauer to approve of Kant’s rejection of transcendent metaphysics, and the positive aspect which led James to reject a Kantian transcendent self in favour of a modified Humean and empiricist account. But Kant’s transcendental method, and its alleged logic, are less mysterious in Kant than in some of his successors. Husserl’s ‘transcendental-phenomenological reduction’, for example, sought to effect a transition from unreflect- ive common sense to the recognition of a pure consciousness or transcendental ego which was not accessible to empirical observation. But it remains unclear how his phenomenological descriptions could yield a priori knowledge of such items. Peirce took seriously Kant’s appeal to an architectonic structure for the critical system in his own account of categories and ‘triadicity’, but it has more often seemed dubious to attach so much significance to Kant’s *architectonic. Moreover, although Kant’s references to a transcendental logic as part of his distinc- tive method may seem to indicate a non-standard version of formal logic, there seems no good reason to think of it in that way. In fact Kant’s transcendental method appeals essentially to two features: first to his novel classification of ‘synthetic a priori’ judgement, and second to the conception of a ‘condition of a possible experience’. The two features coincide naturally with the thought that any proposition which expresses a condition of any possible experience will be bound to have a special status which may be described in terms of the synthetic a priori classification. On one side the conception of a condition of a possible experience places a restriction on what can count as knowledge and licenses it only when it can be brought to bear upon some possible experience. Although such a view is not the same as the Logical Positivists’ appeal to verifiability, nevertheless it shares with them and with Hume a tough-minded criterion with which to evaluate speculative philosophy. On the other side the conception offers the prospect of a new and constructive approach to experience, in which the conditions of that experience are identified as a priori and treated as the background framework which makes it possible. It is this aspect which con- nects so naturally with recent philosophical accounts of *language-games (Wittgenstein), or *conceptual schemes (Strawson), categorial frameworks (Körner), or conceptual relativity (Putnam). It is associated also with Colling- wood’s account of ‘absolute presuppositions’ and above all with Strawson’s project of ‘descriptive metaphysics’. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is often thought to echo Kantian themes in its account of the inex- pressible limits to our experience, and especially in its references to a ‘metaphysical’ self which marks a limit to the world and is not therefore simply a part of it (5.641). But it Kantianism 471 is in Wittgenstein’s later works, such as Philosophical Inves- tigations and On Certainty, that a more direct reference to Kantianism is to be found. For Wittgenstein’s ideas of a form of life and of a language-game expressing such a form and governed by rules which make that experience possible echo Kant’s notion of a condition of possible experience governed by his synthetic a priori principles. Wittgenstein did not classify his rules as synthetic a priori, but he recognized their special status by calling them ‘grammatical’ rules. Although the notion of a language- game captures the Kantian idea of a systematic experience governed by rules, Wittgenstein’s conception, like Körner’s account of a categorial framework, is not designed to cover the whole of our experience, but only some differentiable aspect of it. Strawson’s account of a conceptual scheme, too, dispensed with the synthetic a priori classification, and so produced a Kantianism with more of an empiricist flavour than Kant would have accepted. Of all these recent Kantian accounts, however, Straw- son’s has been the most committed and influential. It brings together the two aspects noted above of a fundamental and irreducible appeal to the notion of the self, and a transcendental method of justifying such fundamental notions. For in Strawson the appeal to conditions of possible experience has been seen as a distinctively Kantian response to traditional scepticism through the notion of a transcendental argument. In a similar way Putnam’s ‘internal realism’ is also a conscious attempt to follow Kant’s appeal to a justified objectivity in experience which does not rest on an absolutist ‘God’s-eye view’ of an independent reality. A doubt, for example, about the feasibility of providing an empiricist analysis of the *self in terms of a closed sequence of sense-impressions might encourage an alternative non-empiricist and Kantian account. If the self, something to which such sequences of impressions belong, is a necessary, a priori, condition of any possible experience, then this may answer, or at least evade, such a traditional scepticism. Strawson’s Kantian account of the self as a primitive notion, not to be itself analysed in terms of mental or physical features, echoes such a response. And in his account of a necessary reidentification of objects as a further condition for possible experience the same technique is explicitly used to rebut a traditional scepticism about *identity. The central idea is that if reidentification is a necessary condition for any possible experience, then the sceptic’s doubt will be either incoherent or else will embody a revisionary recommendation which is at best optional. The doubt will be incoherent on one side, since without a belief in identity there is no possible experience, and hence no way of making sense of the sceptic’s query. It will be an optional revision, on the other side, if the sceptic uses his argument to recommend a change from the standard forms in which such reidentification is realized in our conceptual scheme. Strawson’s appeal to ‘primitive’ features of our experience such as the concept of a person or of reidentification provides a modest Kantianism, but there are less modest ways of understanding Kant’s own account. With regard to the self, for example, many Kantians have taken the view that for Kant such a reference is unavoidably to noumena or things-in-themselves. Such a view is encour- aged by Kant’s account of the resolution of the conflict between cause and *freedom in the Third Antinomy, where it is easy to read him as accepting a ‘two-worlds’ picture of phenomenal causality and noumenal freedom. His remarks on the distinction between empirical and intelligible characters in human agents have sometimes associated Kantianism with an indeterminist doctrine, in which human freedom and responsibility are safeguarded by being exempted from natural causation. Although Kant himself rejects the strategy of exempting humans from causal influence, it remains unclear whether his own resolution of the traditional debate in this context is indeterminist or compatibilist. g.h.b. *neo-Kantianism. H. E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge, 1990). Graham Bird, ‘Kant’s Transcendental Arguments’, in E. Schaper and W. Vossenkuhl (eds.), Reading Kant (Oxford, 1989). D. Davidson, ‘Mental Events’, in L. Foster and J. W. Swanson (eds.), Experience and Theory (London, 1970). Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed. and intro. James Conant (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London, 1959). Kantianism, neo-: see neo-Kantianism. Kaplan, David B. (1933– ). American philosopher at the University of California, known for his work in inten- sional logic, semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. His initial stance was Fregean as in the influential ‘Quantifying In’, but his later work evolved into a theory of direct *reference where, for example, expressions such as demonstratives, indexicals, and proper names are held to be unmediated by abstract senses. In ‘Opacity’ he addresses problems of substitution, dif- ferences between naming and describing, quantifiers, and causal theories of reference. His views are further articu- lated in studies of demonstratives and *indexicals, at the centre of which is the distinction between the content of an expression and its character. Content is the referent in a given context of use. Character (corresponding roughly to linguistic ‘meaning’) determines a content for any given context, as in the utterance ‘I am here’. Also influential are papers on *descriptions, and on metaphysical questions raised by modal *semantics. r.b.m. J. Almog et al., Themes from Kaplan (Oxford, 1989). L. Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of W. V. Quine (La Salle, Ill., 1986). Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8 (1979). L. Linsky (ed.), Reference and Modality (Oxford, 1979). M. Loux (ed.), The Possible and the Actual (Cornell, 1979). karma. Literally action, whether bodily, linguistic, or mental. In most classical Indian traditions, ‘karma’ can also mean the unseen potentials for future pain and 472 Kantianism pleasure which we accumulate as the result of good and bad action. Without exhausting these potentials there is no release from rebirth for the soul. Thus karma consti- tutes bondage in Jaina, Buddhist, and Vedic thought. The law of karma links up the moral quality of past actions with the hedonic quality of present and future life in a deterministic way. Ancient Indian medical and moral philosophers retrodict the birth, life-span, and well-being of an individual in terms of this theory. A slanderer, for example, is allegedly reborn with bad breath. Thanks to this doctrine, the Hindu theist’s God is acquitted of responsibility for evil. Buddhists or Jaina atheists take it as a natural law needing no omniscient monitor. a.c. *Buddhist philosophy; Indian philosophy; Jainism; Veda¯nta; reincarnation. Wendy D. O’Flaherty, Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Trad- itions (Berkeley, Calif., 1980). Kautsky, Karl (1854–1938). The leading Marxist theoret- ician during the two decades before the First World War, Kautsky expressed the precarious orthodoxy of the time. He defended his view with vigour both against the revi- sionist tendencies of Bernstein and against the more revolutionary Marxism of Luxemburg and, later, of Lenin. As well as popularizing Marx’s economic and philosophical ideas, Kautsky produced pioneering works on such diverse subjects as the agrarian question and the origins of Christianity. He was much influenced by the ‘scientific’ *materialism of writers such as Haecher and Darwin, and this perspective marked all his writings. Even in his politics Kautsky remained evolutionary, materialist, and essentially passive. d.m cl. *Marxist philosophy. Dick Geary, Karl Kautsky (Manchester, 1987). Massimo Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution 1880–1938 (London, 1979). Kelsen, Hans (1881–1973). Austrian public lawyer and political theorist, his ‘pure theory of law’ was central to mid-twentieth-century philosophy of law. Rooted in nineteenth-century German *legal positivism and, later, neo- Kantian concern with the conditions for knowing legal norms as norms (neither mere facts nor morally grounded), his sceptically positivist and ethically non- cognitivist work became more Humean after his emigration to America in 1940. Every legal system’s unity and validity derives, he argued, from its basic norm (Grundnorm): apply sanctions in accordance with the historically first (after the latest revolution) constitution and norms made thereunder. Juristic thought is possible only on the hypothesis, presup- position, or transcendental-logical postulate of the basic norm, which in late Kelsen is the content of a fictitious act of will and no longer has the role of resolving conflict between norms. j.m.f. Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Norms, tr. and intro. Michael Hartney (Oxford, 1991). —— Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory, tr. and intro. B. L. and S. L. Paulson (Oxford, 1992). Kenny, Anthony John Patrick (1931– ). British philosopher who has written on topics in the philosophy of mind, medieval philosophy, ancient philosophy, the philosophy of Wittgenstein, the philosophy of Descartes, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. His output includes over thirty books, beginning with Action, Emotion and Will, published in 1963. Kenny was ordained a Catholic priest in 1955 but returned to the lay state in 1963. He then held various university teaching posts. He has been Master of Balliol Col- lege, Oxford. The philosophy of religion has remained one of his major interests and he has produced several volumes in which he has examined arguments for the existence of God. In the area of philosophy of mind, the greatest influence on him has been Wittgenstein, on whom Kenny has written two volumes, and his influence is also evident in his other writings on the philosophy of mind, on Descartes, and on Aquinas. h.w.n. *Frege. A. J. P. Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind(Oxford, 1992). —— A Brief History of Western Philosophy (Oxford, 1998). Keynes, John Maynard (1883–1946). Keynes is primarily remembered for his economic works Treatise on Money (1930) and The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), which argued that governments should raise taxes and lower spending during prosperity and lower taxes and increase spending during recessionary periods, and for his practical contributions to developing the international monetary system. Many believe that Keynesian economics was crucial to avoiding the escalat- ing cycle of boom and bust that Marx believed would inevitably contribute to the destruction of capitalism. Philosophically, Keynes is primarily remembered for his devotion to G. E. Moore’s moral philosophy, and admired for his seminal A Treatise on Probability (1921), which is one of the most important expressions of the a priori or logical theory of *probability: that probability consists fundamentally of an evidentiary relation between propositions. r.c.w. B. W. Bateman and J. B. Davis (eds.), Keynes and Philosophy: Essays on the Origin of Keynes’s Thought (Cheltenham, 1991). R. Weatherford, Philosophical Foundations of Probability Theory (London, 1982). Khaldu¯n:see Ibn Khaldu¯n. Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye (1813–55). Danish writer and social critic widely credited with setting the stage and providing the conceptual tools for modern *existentialism. Kierkegaard was also one of Hegel’s most devastating crit- ics. The formative years in Copenhagen were marked by personal dependence on an oppressively religious father and by the deaths, before he reached the age of 21, of his Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye 473 mother and five of the family of seven of which he was the youngest. Kierkegaard spent ten years at the university before completing his dissertation On the Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates (1841) preliminary to a career in the Church. His second major work Either/Or (1843) marked a postponement of that career and was the outcome of the fateful decision to break off an engagement and disappointment at not finding in Schelling’s Berlin lec- tures a philosophical alternative to established *Hegelian- ism. The work portrays two life-views, one consciously hedonistic, the other ethical in a way which Hegelians would recognize except that the choice of the ethical is a personal one, not the outcome of a philosophical insight. The hedonistic or ‘aesthetic’ alternative is presented by a gifted essayist, and member of a society called ‘compan- ions of the deathbound’, who applies it as a consistent principle in his own life, while the ethical perspective is conveyed in two extended admonitory letters addressed to the hedonist by a friend, a state functionary who urges him to admit that his situation is one of *despair so that he can then ‘choose himself’ in ethical categories, these providing the true fulfilment of the aesthetic values he prizes. Kierkegaard’s own intentions are concealed behind an elaborate barrage of noms de plume (the work is published by a pseudonymous ‘editor’ who tells how he has come upon the papers quite by accident). The impression given by the title that the aesthetic and ethical life-views represent an exhaustive choice is dis- turbed by a concluding sermon passed on to the hedonist by the functionary on the theme that before God we are always in the wrong. Kierkegaard claimed later that at the time he himself had despaired of finding fulfilment in marriage but said that he had portrayed marriage as a form of fulfilment because it struck him as being ‘the deepest form of revelation’. Unable to reveal himself in that way, Kierkegaard embarked on a series of ‘edifying’ works under his own name. These works, though on the surface in a conventionally religious vein, convey deep moral- psychological insight and it would not be improper to refer to them as philosophical. The practice of concealment was continued, however, in a parallel series of pseudonymous works which include those more usually regarded as philosophical. These include, already in 1843, two works written largely in Berlin, Repetition and Fear and Trembling, followed in 1844 by Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of Anxiety, and in 1845 by Stages on Life’s Way, in which a religious stage is distinguished from Either/Or’s ethical alternative. The pseudonymous authorship was to have ended with the publication of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846), Kierkegaard having in mind to resume his intention to enter the priesthood. Instead, however, he wrote further non-pseudonymous works on specifically Christian themes motivated in part by the thought that he was better able to serve the truth as a writer. Among them are Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing (1847) with its account of *double-mindedness and the formidable Works of Love (1847). But at the same time, virtually ostracized by a feud he had himself provoked with a satiric weekly and which left him a figure of public ridicule, Kierkegaard’s plans for at least partial self-revelatory absorption into society had given way to an urge to reveal to society its errors. The popular monarchy and people’s Church, newly established in the aftermath of 1848, and which Kierkegaard saw as merely finite institutions catastrophically usurping the true role of religion, provided the political target. Deciding to announce that his intentions as an author had been religious all along, Kierkegaard now planned a second (unrevised) edition of Either/Or together with an explanation (The Point of View of my Work as an Author) of the relation of that and the subsequent pseudonymous works to the Christian themes of his non-pseudonymous production. For a variety of reasons detailed in his journals the explanation was withheld (but published posthumously by his brother in 1859), and instead Kierkegaard gave out two further works under a new pseudonym. The first of these, The Sickness unto Death (1849), followed hard upon the second edition of Either/Or. It typ- ologizes forms of despair as failures to sustain a ‘synthesis’ which expresses the structure of selfhood. The work intro- duces a non-substantial but normative concept of the self or ‘spirit’. The most common and dangerous form of despair is one which people fail to recognize in themselves and even mistake for its opposite. In a spiritless society whose institutions have taken over spirit’s functions also in name, no real basis for spirit, or true selfhood, remains in the established forms of life. Spiritual possibilities then tend to find their outlets outside such forms in madness, religious intoxication, the cult of the aesthetic, or in utopian politics. This, from the individual’s perspective, is one way of failing to maintain the synthesis. The other is for the individual to duck below the level of its own spiritual possibilities and lead a spiritually emasculated life of worldliness. The solution which The Sickness unto Death prescribes for despair is faith, or willing acceptance of the task of becoming a self ‘posited’ not by itself but by a transcendent power. In the final pseudonymous work, Training in Christianity (1850), Kierkegaard readdresses themes raised in the earlier Philosophical Fragments, in particular the individual’s relation to Christ as one not of history but of con- temporaneity and of shared human degradation. In the five years remaining until his early death at 42, Kierkegaard lived in increasingly straitened (though never degrading) circumstances, expending the remainder of a considerable inheritance on an explosive broadsheet (The Instant), in which, under his own name, he savagely sat- irized the State Church, its dignitaries, and minions. According to the withheld explanation the pseudonymous (‘aesthetic’) works deliberately adopt an aesthetic point of view in order to loosen the grip on their readers of a falsely ‘aesthetic’ picture of religious fulfilment. They can also be read as mirroring their true author’s own struggles as a social outsider playing with the thought that his 474 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye literary talents and situation might have marked him out for a specifically religious mission. In Either/Or human fulfilment, corresponding to the second, ‘ethical’ stage in the progression from the aesthetic to the religious, meant choice of a self wedded in a conventionally Hegelian way to shared social norms. The subsequent pseudonymous works, beginning with Repetition and Fear and Trembling, present the radically anti-Hegelian idea that the ethical component in the individual’s life is established first in a psychologically unmasked and socially unmediated relation to God. The slim but elegantly crafted Philosophical Fragments contrasts an idealist view, identified with Plato’s Socrates but clearly to be construed as a progenitor of Hegel, with one where the relationship to truth depends on faith. The massive Postscript is described by Kierkegaard as a turning-point in the ‘aesthetic’ works, since it clearly identifies the latter view with Christianity and raises explicitly the question of what it means to be a Christian. The Christian’s proper relation to the ‘absolute object of worship’ is *inwardness, or a ‘passionate’ interest in a transcen- dentally grounded fulfilment, the more passionate because the individual is aware that no empirical or rational inquiry can support acceptance of an assurance based exclusively on the belief that some other existing individual has been the eternal in time (the God-man). This is literally unthink- able and therefore immune to argument or evidence one way or the other. The principal target is Hegel’s ‘System’, which, by treating matters requiring personal choice as topics for a shared rational insight, turns living issues into matters for a generalized curiosity. In fact there are two opposed objections to a scientific approach to the question of personal fulfilment. In Hegelian science the matter is decided already by the truth of being which will emerge as the system of thought develops, but that abstracts from your own existence which ‘keeps thought and being apart’ and therefore fails to capture the forward movement of the individual’s own life. And treating the issue as a scientific matter in a general sense to be decided collaboratively in the light of evidence not all of which is (or ever will be) in, ignores the urgency of the Christian message which stands there, as William James would say, as a ‘forced’ option that brooks no delay. Some see in Kierkegaard’s philosophical pseudonym ( Johannes Climacus) an assassin hired to deal with the Hegelians, so that the absurdity and paradox of Christianity arise only for the misguided ‘systematizer’. Wittgensteinians have interpreted the Postscript as a demonstration of what happens if you apply the rules of one language-game inappropriately to another, but this inner relativism fits ill with Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the ‘crucifixion’ of reason in faith. In his journals Kierkegaard says that paradox and absurdity are the negative conditions of faith—guarantees, as it were, that the assurance sought in faith is not being treated as though it were achievable through the exercise of some human capacity. That capacity need not be cognitive; the distinction between *Religiousness A and Reli- giousness B is between, on the one hand, a view which interprets what the pseudonymous author calls ‘dying from immediacy’ procedurally, as if a relationship with the object of worship can be established simply by subordinat- ing all ‘relative’ ends to an ‘absolute’ end, and on the other hand a non-immanentist view and the ‘Christian’ view in which human capacities as such extend no further than to history so that a historical event, the Incarnation, offers our only relation to the Absolute. From this point of view the Absolute lies beyond the reach of any kind of natural relationship. What then is the positive content of faith? The pseudonymous works do not say; their ‘dialectic’ is, as some have said, merely ‘negative’. But the final pseudonymous work, Training in Christianity, can be read together with parts of the non-pseudonymous ‘religious’ corpus as indi- cating that the saving truth can be grasped in a moral agent’s sense, in imitating the example of Christ, of acting out this truth in the form of Christian love. The earlier Works of Love presents the Christian ideal of love of one’s neighbour in the form of a generalized selflessness. Part of what emerges is that it is only by removing personal preferences that values inherent in other persons, but also in nature, can be truly acknowledged and allowed their fulfilment. This assumes that the value or worth of persons and things is neither, as Hobbes has it, their price nor any degree of natural attachment to them. Values, on this view, reside in possibilities inherent in the persons and things themselves independently of human interests, and indeed these interests stand in the way of those values both in the sense that they do not become visible and in the sense that they fail to be elicited. The inner consistency of the view as a generally applicable ethics depends at least in part on how far the sacrifice of human desires or interests is compatible with the sacrificer’s own personal or human fulfilment. Kierkegaard detects in social forms, and in patterns of human behaviour in general, a pervasive disinclination to face live issues in their appropriately living form. In this respect Hegelianism is not simply a failed attempt to capture the forward movement of life, but part of a general contempt for the individual, evident also in the conflation of the truism that human life is impossible without political groupings with the pernicious idea that the individual’s fulfilment can come to expression only in the form of political association or religious community (see Literary Review: The Two Ages (1846) ). Kierkegaard’s writings are profitably grasped in the light of his sense of a prevailing flight from *subjectivity and of society’s need to divest itself of protective self-images. The more scandalous views attributed to Kierkegaard, such as the arbitrary defeasibility of shared norms, the subjectivity of truth, and the supposed foundational role assigned to criterionless choice, often vanish on a closer reading of the texts, which in context lend themselves to more readily accept- able readings. Thus the notorious teleological suspension of the ethical in Fear and Trembling can be seen as part of Kierkegaard’s nowadays uncontroversial insistence that systems of shared social norms are purely historical phenomena set against his championing of the view Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye 475 that a true system of values derives directly from an unconditioned transcendent source, unmediated by con- tingent and merely finite facts of preference. His target is the common assumption in his time that facts of preference are both historical and expressions of an unfolding Absolute. The claims in the Postscript for the subjectivity of truth can be read as the requirement that the relation to the unconditional source of value be one of inwardness and personal devotion both to the source itself and, through it, though distributively rather than collectively, to mankind. As for the rumour of a criterionless choice, in Kierkegaard there is little or no evidence for this idea as distinct from that of the notion of personal commitment and choice. At least the reader of Either/Or, the most widely cited source for the rumour, cannot fail to detect signs of dialogue in that work, objections to the ethical life-view implicit in the first part which are then made explicit and countered in the second part, which is also in itself a sustained argument in favour of the ethical alternative. Failure to choose the ethical alternative is presented as more in the nature of a motivated rejection of a form of human fulfilment that the hedonist is already in a position to acknowledge but refuses so to do, than a choice made in a vacuum between two quite independent and equally valid ways of life. The tendency to ascribe extreme views to Kierkegaard may be due in part to the fanatical anti-humanism of his later rejection of all bourgeois forms of human association, including marriage and the family. Kierkegaard himself remarks on how the original either/or becomes radicalized so that in the end both ethics and institutional religion (castigated as the fraud of ‘Christendom’) end up on the aesthetic side as merely forms of self-indulgence, while self-abnegation, suffering, and devotion to God now form the saving option. This could be seen as a pat- tern set from the start; Lukács suggests it is the outcome of Kierkegaard’s life-long tendency to spite reality. Or per- haps the extremity was one that Kierkegaard was driven to by circumstances. The radical stance might also, however, at a pinch be interpreted as prescribed by the Post- script’s insistence that Religiousness A is a necessary prolegomenon to Religiousness B. The later Kierkegaard may be insisting that the institutions of a spiritless society must be comprehensively vacated before creative alternatives based on true selfhood can replace them. We note that Kierkegaard describes The Sickness unto Death as con- taining a polemic directed at that ‘altogether un-Christian conception’, Christendom. Regarding the establishment’s scorn of sects, he said there was ‘infinitely more Christian truth’ in the errors of their ways than in ‘the mawkishness, torpor, and sloth of the establishment’. The trick is to be rid of the errors of the pagans without losing, as in a spiritless society which shuns true selfhood, their ‘primitive’ spiritual impetus. For obvious reasons rationalists and, because of his attitude to shared norms, Hegelians have dismissed Kierkegaard as an irrationalist; while what in Kierkegaard’s writings repels rationalists and Hegelians alike has drawn sympathy from circles later stigmatized as fascist. Equally, democrats are put off by Kierkegaard’s contempt for public opinion, the crowd, and parliamentary institutions, and although Marcuse saw ‘traits of a deep-rooted social theory’ in Kierkegaard, the Christian framework and the focus on the individual make Kierkegaard an obvious target for the Marxist. Eagerly read in German academic circles at the beginning of the twentieth century, and heralded by theologians as the provider of a radical Christian apolo- getic, Kierkegaard also influenced agnostic and atheist thinkers of such divergent political sympathies as Heideg- ger and Lukács. The enormous extent of the former’s debt to Kierkegaard is still to be appreciated. The latter in his pre-Marxist days admired what he saw as the tragic hero- ism with which Kierkegaard, by exalting the notion of choice, vainly defied the necessities of life by seeking, first in his own life, to impose on them a poetic form. The later Lukács blamed Kierkegaard for the ‘bourgeois’ philosophy of post-war existentialism and even saw in him a source of modern nihilism and decadence. As if in confirmation of this latter charge some post-modern writers, notably Jean Baudrillard, focus on Kierkegaard the ‘aesthetic’ author and see in this complex man a pre-incarnation of the modern existentialist. Adorno, sympathizing with Kierkegaard’s campaign against the tyranny of the universal over the particular though not with the resort to religious concepts, found in Kierkegaard’s experimental ‘aesthetic’ writings the makings of a new style of reasoning which elicits rather than buries the truth of the particular. Many modern philosophers have found in the religious framework of Kierkegaard’s writings an impediment to any serious appreciation of his thought. Wittgenstein, however, once referred to Kierkegaard as ‘by far the most profound thinker of the last century’. a.h. S. N. Dunning, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness: A Structural Analysis of the Theory of Stages (Princeton, NJ, 1985). John W. Elrod, Being and Existence in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Works (Princeton, NJ, 1975). A. Hannay, Kierkegaard (London, 1982; rev. edn. 1991). Søren Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, ed. P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr, and N. Thulstrup, 16 vols. (Copenhagen, 1909–78). —— Søren Kierkegaards Samlede Værker, ed. A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg, and H. O. Lange, 20 vols. (Copenhagen, 1961–4). —— Kierkegaard’s Writings, ed. H. V. and E. H. Hong et al., 26 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1978– ). —— Fear and Trembling, Eng. tr. (Harmondsworth, 1985). —— The Sickness unto Death, Eng. tr. (Harmondsworth, 1989). —— Either/Or, Eng. tr., abridged (Harmondsworth, 1992). B. Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark (Bloomington, Ind., 1990). G. Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious (London, 1991). M. C. Taylor, Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self (Princeton, NJ, 1975). killing. Presumably no society could survive unless it had some restrictions on its members killing each other. But the prohibitions that societies have on killing vary greatly. In Greek and Roman times to be a human—that is, a member of the species Homo sapiens—was not sufficient to 476 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye guarantee that one’s life would be protected. Slaves or other ‘barbarians’ could be killed, under conditions that varied from time to time; and deformed infants were exposed to the elements on a hilltop. The coming of Chris- tianity brought a new insistence on the wrongness of killing all born of human parents, in part because all humans were seen as having an immortal soul, and in part because to kill a human being is to usurp God’s right to decide when we shall live and when we shall die. Non- human animals, on the other hand, remained unprotected because they were believed to have been placed by God under man’s dominion. This doctrine of the sanctity of all (and only) human life remains the orthodox view on the morality of killing. Some contemporary philosophers, among them Jonathan Glover, James Rachels, and Peter Singer, have challenged this orthodoxy, arguing that membership of a given species—for example, Homo sapiens—cannot in itself determine the value of a being’s life, or the wrongness of killing that being. Rather, this wrongness must depend on some morally relevant characteristics that the being has. Sentience, or the capacity to feel pleasure or pain, seems to be a minimal characteristic, and so the killing of plants is not wrong in itself. In addition to sentience, however, Glover gives an important place to the being’s capacity for *autonomy, for making his or her own decisions (including a decision about whether or not to continue living). Killing an autonomous being against that being’s will is the most drastic possible violation of autonomy, and this makes it more seriously wrong than the killing of a sentient being not capable of autonomy. Rachels focuses on whether the being can live a bio- graphical, rather than a merely biological, life, which is similar to the emphasis given by Singer to the ability to see oneself as having a past and a future. To kill such a being, unless at the being’s request, thwarts the preferences for the future that the being may have, and this makes the killing wrong in a way that is additional to any wrong that may be incurred by the killing of a sentient being unable to form any preferences for the future. The effect of these arguments is to distinguish a class of beings whom it is especially wrong to kill. The term ‘person’ is often used to distinguish this class from the class of human beings as a whole, for not all human beings are autonomous, or capable of seeing themselves as having a past and a future. Infants, and the profoundly intellectually disabled, for example, are not. Chimpanzees, on the other hand, appear to be persons in this sense. Hence it is an implication of this view that, other things being equal, it is worse to kill a normal chimpanzee than a profoundly intellectually disabled human being. Of course, to arrive at a final judgement about the wrongness of killing any being, we need to consider also the effect of the killing on relatives and friends, and on the community as a whole. The *slippery slope argument is often used as an objec- tion to any change in our attitude to killing human beings. We should, however, be equally aware of the possible undesirable effects of, for example, allowing severely disabled infants to die slowly from dehydration or infec- tion because we believe it wrong to kill them. p.s. *euthanasia. Jonathan Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives (Har- mondsworth, 1977). J. McMahan, The Ethics of Killing (Oxford, 2002). James Rachels, The End of Life (Oxford, 1986). Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1993), chs. 4–6. Kim, Jaegwon (1934– ). Author of numerous well- known papers on metaphysics and epistemology, best known for his pioneering work on *events, *supervenience concepts, and psychophysical relations. Kim takes events to be exemplifications of properties (or relations) by an object (or set of objects) at a time. On this view, Oedipus’ marrying Jocasta and Oedipus’ marrying his mother would be the same event, while Brutus’ killing Caesar and Brutus’ stabbing Caesar would be different events. Kim has argued for a form of materialism in which mental properties are ‘locally reducible’ to physical properties by way of species-specific correlating laws. Non- reductive materialism, he argues, collapses either into a position in which mental properties do no causal work (a form of eliminativism) or into one in which mental properties do not depend in any significant way on physical properties (a form of dualism). n.l. *mind, problems of the philosophy of. J. Kim, Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (Cam- bridge, 1993). —— Mind in a Physical World (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). kind, natural. It is easier to say what a natural kind term is than to say what natural kinds themselves are, ontologic- ally speaking. Natural kind terms constitute a class of general terms and include both mass terms, like ‘gold’ and ‘water’, and certain *sortal terms, like ‘tiger’ and ‘apple’. Loosely, they may be said to denote types of naturally occurring stuffs and things. Kripke has argued that natural kind terms are *rigid designators. e.j.l. S. P. Schwartz (ed.), Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds (Ithaca, NY, 1977). Kindı¯, Yaaqu¯ b ibn Ish . a¯q al- (d. after 870). Widely known as the first Arab philosopher, he was instrumental in the spread of Greek philosophy in the state-endowed Acad- emy in Baghdad. He commissioned translations of Greek philosophical texts that served as inspiration for his own Arabic works, which identify the formative, syncretic period of Islamic philosophy. He is the first Islamic philosopher to offer systematic explanations for some of the debated theological issues of his time, such as creation, immortality, God’s knowledge, and prophecy. His On First Philosophy was the first Arabic work on syncretic metaphysics. Though some of the issues he defined, such as creation ex nihilo, were later rejected, many, such as immortality of the individual soul, and the distinction Kindı¯, al- 477 between human and revealed knowledge, helped define lasting problems of Islamic philosophy. h.z. Al-Kindı¯’s Metaphysics, tr. Alfred L. Ivry (Albany, NY, 1974). kine¯ sis. Aristotle’s distinction between kine¯sis (motion, change), and energeia (activity, actualization) prefigures various contemporary distinctions in the philosophy of agency. Theologically the notion occurs in ‘first mover’ proofs of God’s existence: things changed in a basic quality can only be changed by something which, at the time of change, has that quality. In such a series, argued Aquinas, *infinite regress is impossible; hence there must be a first mover. j.j.m. *prime mover. T. Penner, ‘Verbs and the Identity of Actions: A Philosophical Exercise in the Interpretation of Aristotle’, in O. P. Wood and G. Pitcher (eds.), Ryle: A Collection of Critical Essays (London, 1970). Philip Kitcher (1947– ). Contemporary philosopher of science, defender of naturalism in philosophy, British-born but US-based. Kitcher focused initially on philosophy of biology and mathematics, but is now expansive in his interests. Vaulting Ambition (1985) was a harsh critique of sociobiology. But Kitcher has also resisted various arguments alleging conceptual problems with mainstream evolutionary theory. In the 1980s he defended the view that explanation in science is a matter of unification. This view, developed partly in reaction to causal theories of explanation, exemplifies his metaphysical outlook—generally realist but attracted to Kantian options in the area of causation. Kitcher presented a total philosophy of science in his weighty Advancement of Science (1993). Here and elsewhere, he has engaged in detail with claims that science has been shown to be essentially non-rational when fundamental theoretical choices are made. He defends a mod- erate conception of scientific progress and rationality, and includes innovative mathematical modelling of science’s social organization. Kitcher’s recent work has extended into ethics and the political role of science. The Lives to Come (1996) was commissioned by the Library of Con- gress as a philosophical exploration of the human genome project. p.g s. P. Kitcher, The Advancement of Science (Oxford, 1993). —— Science, Truth, and Democracy (Oxford, 2001). —— In Mendel’s Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology (Oxford, 2003). klepsydra. The klepsydra was typically a metal vessel with an aperture at its narrow neck and little holes which could be plugged at its wide end. It is sometimes thought that the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles used it to prove the reality and substantiality of air, by pointing out that, when inverted in water with the little holes plugged, water was prevented from rising in it, but, with the holes unplugged, water rose unhindered by the air which it expelled. As air was in fact one of the four Greek elements, there was taken to be no need for any proof of its distinct reality. What Empedocles sought to prove by his remarks was the independent reality of *space, which had just been denied by the Eleatics. The air was expelled, but not its space, which was left behind for water to occupy. The Greeks needed the reality of space to prove the possibility of *motion. w.e.a. John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (London, 1892). Kneale, William Calvert (1906–90). British philosopher and historian of logic, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford (1932–60), and White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford (1960–6). Kneale published in many areas including metaphysics, philosophical logic, philosophy of mind, and moral philosophy. In Probability and Induction (1949), he surveys classical theories of induction, argues that probability theory cannot justify induction, and offers his own justification. Here and elsewhere he argues for the importance of natural necessity in understanding law, causation, and subjunctive conditionals. The Development of Logic, written with his wife, Martha, is both a history of logic and an introduction to logic and topics connected to it. This thick book devotes about half of its 761 pages to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with extended atten- tion to Frege. d.h.s. *necessity, nomic. William Kneale and Martha Hurst Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford, 1962). knowledge. The principal intellectual attainment studied by *epistemology. Virtually all theorists agree that true belief is a necessary condition for knowledge, and it was once thought that justification, when added to true belief, yields a necessary and sufficient condition for knowledge. Its sufficiency, however, was disproved by Gettier as follows. Suppose one justifiably believes q although it is false; then one reasonably infers p, which is true. The result is a justified true belief in p, yet one cannot be said to know that p. Can the problem be solved by requiring that no intermediate conclusions like q be false? No; other counter-examples remain. Sam believes, through visual appearance, that a lighted candle is before him. There is indeed a candle there but Sam sees only a holo- gram of a candle, not the real candle, which is blocked from view. Then Sam lacks knowledge, although he has justified true belief that rests on no false intermediate conclusions. Other theories of knowledge put less weight on justification. According to the causal theory, knowledge consists in true belief that bears an appropriate causal connection to the fact in question. This handles the candle case because its presence is causally unconnected to Sam’s belief. Reliability theories say that someone knows only if his true belief is acquired by a reliable process or method. This may be understood to entail the *counterfactual requirement: S would not believe p if p were false. Causal, reliability, and counterfactual theories are generally called ‘externalist’, because they make it possible to 478 Kindı¯, al- satisfy the conditions for knowledge (e.g. causal- connection conditions) without being aware that one satisfies them. ‘Internalist’ theories emphasize conditions of which subjects are aware. The demarcation between these types of theory is problematic, however, because paradigmatic internalist theories, such as coherentism, may also make knowledge attainable through subject- ively inaccessible conditions. Whether a belief coheres with the rest of one’s beliefs, for example, might not be readily accessible to the subject. Epistemologists often look to theories of knowledge to settle the problem of *scepticism, but how easily this problem can be settled is questionable. One theory says that a person knows p only if he ‘discriminates’ it from relevant alternatives. This ostensibly favours anti-scepticism because not all logically possible alternatives seem relevant. Suppose Jane sees a barn in the field. Although she cannot discriminate it from a papier-mâché facsimile, such a facsimile is not a relevant alternative (unless facsimiles abound in the neighbourhood). Scepticism might gain a foothold here, however, by claiming that every logically possible alternative is relevant. Who is right in this dis- pute, and is there a determinate answer? This raises methodological issues about the theory of knowledge. Is it a theory of some evaluator-independent ‘stuff’, on the model of the chemical theory of water? Or is it a theory of human concepts and their deployment? On the former approach, there should always be a fact about whether someone knows, but why should our ordinary judgements be reliable guides to such facts? On the latter approach, knowledge may be a very fuzzy concept that has determinate applications only when certain parameters are set, and these parameters can legitimately be set either to the sceptic’s or to the anti-sceptic’s taste. a.i.g. *justification, epistemic; reliabilism; foundationalism; knowledge, limits of; sociology of knowledge; tacit knowledge; virtues, intellectual. A. Goldman, Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sci- ences (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). K. Lehrer, Theory of Knowledge (Boulder, Colo., 1990). R. Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass., 1981). T. Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford, 2000). knowledge, the limits of. The issue of the extent and limits of human *knowledge is a perplexing one. There is no way of establishing a proportion between what we know and what we do not. We clearly cannot estimate the amount of knowledge yet to be discovered (both because there is no real measure of what is known and because we have no reliable information regarding new knowledge yet to come). We realize that our knowledge contains errors of omission and commission but do not know just where they lie. Is human knowledge completable? The incompletability of scientific progress is compatible with the view that every question that can be asked at any particular state of the art is going to be answered—or dissolved—at some future state: it does not commit one to the idea that there are any unanswerable questions placed altogether beyond the limits of possible resolution. No recourse to insolubilia need be made to maintain the incompletability of our scientific knowledge. How could we possibly establish that a question Q will continue to be both raisable and unanswerable in every future state of science, seeing that we cannot now circumscribe the changes that science might undergo in the future? If a question belongs to science at all—if it reflects the sort of issue that science might possibly resolve in principle and in theory—then we shall never be in a position to put it beyond the reach of possible future states of science as such. n.r. *justification, epistemic. E. McMullin, ‘Limits of Scientific Inquiry’, in J. C. Steinhardt (ed.), Science and the Modern World (New York, 1966). N. Rescher, The Limits of Science (Berkeley, Calif., 1984). knowledge, theories of: see epistemology, history of; epistemology, problems of. knowledge and science. Science systematically corrects the errors of *common sense. Thus, from science we learned that, contrary to first appearances, the sun does not go round the earth each day. But what happens when science seems to undermine not particular beliefs, but whole tracts of experience? Can science really tell us that, say, the world is not in itself coloured or that the famous solid, unmoving table of Eddington’s physicist is mostly empty space thinly populated with rapidly moving par- ticles? Too radical a correction of common sense by science runs the danger of depriving scientific theories of the ultimately commonsensical evidential basis on which they depend. It would be safer to regard the theories of science as a whole as offering highly generalized and effective abstractions from the richness of what there is, rather than as the only or the whole truth. a.o’h. *science, history of the philosophy of; science, problems of the philosophy of. G. F. Macdonald (ed.), Perception and Identity (London, 1979), esp. the essays by M. Dummett and P. F. Strawson and the replies of A. J. Ayer. knowledge by presence. Distinguished from acquired *knowledge, this technical term is used in Islamic philosophy to designate a non-predicative mode of cognition required prior to the definition and construction of fundamental philosophical principles. Similar in sense to Plato’s ‘intellectual vision’, and in form to Aristotle’s ‘quick wit’ (ankhinoia), it was first fully formulated by Sohravardı¯. This type of knowledge posits priority to the self- conscious subject’s immediate grasp of the real, manifest essence of objects. Tantamount to primary intuition, similar to Kant’s ‘immediate relation to objects’, but not reduced to Russell’s ‘knowledge by *acquaintance’, it was given objective validity by later mystics and theologians, who emphasized its mystical and experiential implica- tions, and made rhetorical use of it to ‘prove’ the primacy knowledge by presence 479 . has written on topics in the philosophy of mind, medieval philosophy, ancient philosophy, the philosophy of Wittgenstein, the philosophy of Descartes, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of. he said there was ‘infinitely more Christian truth’ in the errors of their ways than in the mawkishness, torpor, and sloth of the establishment’. The trick is to be rid of the errors of the pagans. to the emphasis given by Singer to the ability to see oneself as having a past and a future. To kill such a being, unless at the being’s request, thwarts the preferences for the future that the

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