The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 61 doc

avicenna is the Latinized name by which the Persian Ibn Sina is known in the West; he was the most brilliant of the Islamic Aristotelians and a leading figure in the vigorous debate which accompanied the development of Islamic philosophy and theology in the fifth century after Muhammad. thomas aquinas, born and educated in southern Italy, became the greatest teacher of the Dominican monastic order. In the mid-thirteenth century he developed Aristotle’s legacy into an exhaustive, rigorously argued philosophical and theological system. roger bacon was the first great Oxford philosopher; he enlisted scientific method in philosophical and theological enquiry. duns scotus was called Doctor Subtilis for his subtle re- conciliation of Aristotelian philosophy with the doctrines of the Franciscan monastic tradition. medieval philosophy who held that the eternity of the world was neither prov- able nor disprovable. His teacher, Albert the Great, held, to the contrary, that Aristotle’s position on this matter was false, and that the doctrine that the world had a beginning in time could be demonstrated. There is a common belief that the problem of *univer- sals is the philosophical problem of the Middle Ages. It should be said that that belief, in any case exaggerated, does not address the fact that the problem of universals is not one problem but a large cluster of problems. And indeed problems about universals have always been centre-stage in the history of philosophy; and universals are as much an issue now as they have ever been. Never- theless, the fact remains that a philosopher’s position on whether certain entities were mind-independent (in which case they had real existence, the solution of ‘realists’) or were mind-dependent (in which case they had nominal existence, the solution of ‘nominalists’) entered into the interstices of many debates. One problem concerning universals was this: granted that several individual things have a common nature as a result of which they are members of the same species, what is the mode of existence of this common nature? Does it exist in the individuals that have the nature? Those, for example Wyclif, who replied affirmatively are realists. But there are difficulties associated with this pos- ition. For example, if the universal doghood, which must be in an animal if the animal is a dog, is in fact in a given animal, then how can it also be in another animal? Must the universal be divided in two for it to be in a second ani- mal? If so then it surely follows that since each of these ani- mals has only half the universal in it, each must be only half a dog—which is an absurd conclusion. Realists had a problem explaining how a universal can really be in many things at once. Yet they must say that a universal can be in many things at once, for if it cannot, then it cannot be uni- versal. The chief alternative proposal to realism is this, that a universal is the concept that we form under which we can bring all the things in that species, as the nominal- ists (or conceptualists) such as Ockham thought. On this account the universality of a universal lies in the fact that the concept thus formed is equally predicable of many things. There is a direct line of descent to Ockham’s pos- ition from that of Abelard, who argued famously that common natures are really utterances (voces) or mental entities. For both Abelard and Ockham the doctrine of universals had a central role in the theory of predication. A version of the debate between realists and nominal- ists was conducted in the Middle Ages in connection with the existence of values. Does God command us to per- form acts of a given kind because they are in any case good, or is their goodness caused by the fact of God’s com- manding them? (*Euthyphro problem.) An affirmative answer to the first question implies a realist position, namely that values have a real existence independently of God’s will, whereas an affirmative reply to the second question implies a nominalist position, namely that values owe their existence to an act of divine will. This latter doc- trine, known as voluntarism, was associated, though inaccurately, with Duns Scotus. Secular versions of not only this, but also many other medieval debates, constitute a large part of the philosophical scene today. a.bro. *Aristotelianism. A. J. P. Kenny, Medieval Philosophy (Oxford, 2005). D. Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought, 2nd edn. (London, 1988). N. Kretzmann et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1998). A. S. McGrade (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philoso- phy (Cambridge, 2003). Megarics (4th century bc). The Megarics scorned ana- logical reasoning (‘If it’s from like to like, one should con- sider the things themselves, rather than those like them; if it’s from unlike to unlike, the comparison is pointless’), modalities (‘Only the actual is possible; e.g. someone who isn’t building cannot build’), and predication (‘If we predi- cate to run of a horse, subject and predicate differ. Since they differ, it’s wrong to say that a horse runs’; ‘What I’m pointing to isn’t cabbage. For cabbage existed ages ago. So this isn’t cabbage’). So how could wisdom, God, and intel- lect all be, as the Megarics insisted, good? Simple: they were ‘one thing, with many names’. In ancient times, ‘Megaric’ was applied only to the school founded by Euclides of Megara in Greece. Much modern scholarship perversely applies the term to others too. n.c.d. Gabriele Giannantoni (ed.), Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae (Naples, 1990), i. 375–483 (= Elenchos, vol. xviii*). Meinong, Alexius (1853–1920) is one of the most mis- understood and reviled philosophers of recent times. According to a prevalent view, he was a spendthrift meta- physician who delighted in multiplying entities continu- ously and needlessly. Gilbert Ryle, for example, speaks of him as the ‘supreme entity-multiplier in the history of philosophy’. Meinong’s fatal mistake allegedly consisted in mistaking the meanings of words for objects. With this distorted perspective, his importance derives entirely from the fact that he forced Russell, Wittgenstein, Ryle, and later English philosophers to realize that *meanings are not objects. But this conception of Meinong’s phil- osophical importance is quite mistaken. Meinong attended the University of Vienna in the fall of 1870 and graduated in the summer of 1874 with history as his major. In the fall of the same year, he entered the law school of the University of Vienna. Soon afterwards, under the guidance of Franz Brentano, he turned to phil- osophy. In his autobiographical notes, Meinong states that he may have jealously guarded his independence of the forceful personality of Brentano, and that this may have caused misunderstandings between him and his teacher. ‘But what in life could not be laid to rest’, he con- cludes, ‘in death has been reconciled; and before the inner eye of my memory, there stands once again, as a treasure I shall never lose, my admired teacher, a figure of spiritual Meinong, Alexius 581 beauty, bathed in the golden sunshine of the summer of his own and my youth.’ From 1878 until 1882, Meinong was Privatdozent at the University of Vienna. Then he was appointed Extraordinarius of philosophy at the Uni- versity of Graz, and, later, Ordinarius. He lived and worked for the rest of his life in Graz. The following story, I think, is characteristic of his way of life. When he was repeatedly urged to take a vacation, he finally and very reluctantly consented. He packed a suitcase and moved from his house in Graz to a hotel a few blocks away, where he stayed for two weeks and undoubtedly worked on his philosophy, before he returned to his home! To understand Meinong’s philosophy, it is necessary to see how it develops step by step over many years from an idealistic (Berkeleian) and most austere beginning into a realistic and ample philosophical system. In his earliest publications, the Hume Studien I (1877) and II (1882), Meinong deals with two thoroughly traditional philo- sophical problems, the problem of *universals and the problem of *relations. In Hume Studien I, Meinong adopts a Berkeleian ontology. An ordinary perceptual object, like Berkeley’s apple, is conceived of as a complex of property instances: a certain colour instance, associated with a cer- tain shape instance, associated with a certain taste instance, etc. These *property instances (*individual prop- erties, *abstract individuals), in turn, are associated with a place and a moment. A complex is individuated, according to Meinong, by these places and moments. The property instances themselves are both particular and universal: if they are viewed, through acts of abstraction, in isolation from the places and moments, they are universal; if viewed as associated with places and moments, they are particular. This is Meinong’s early solution of the nomin- alism–realism problem. Finally, all of these complexes of property instances are identified, in Berkeley’s fashion, with complex presentations, that is with mental entities. This view calls for a closer inspection of the relations required by an ontology of complexes. This is the topic of Hume Studien II. Here Meinong discusses the three rela- tions involved in complexes. Firstly, there is the relation of equality among instances which guarantees that property instances can be grouped in the required way. Where a realist speaks of two things as sharing the same property, Meinong speaks of two numerically different but equal property instances. Secondly, there is the relation of asso- ciation which binds the various instances together into a complex. And thirdly, there is the part–whole relation between an instance and the complex to which it belongs. This relation corresponds in Meinong’s scheme of things to predication. The great achievement of the Hume Studien II consists in Meinong’s eventual recognition that there are mind-independent relations. Like Frege and Russell, he thus breaks with a long philosophical tradition, accord- ing to which relations are merely the creations of mental acts of comparison. But even in the Hume Studien II, we find the pervasive idealistic confusion between presentations (*ideas) and their objects. However, this confusion does not last long. Meinong, just like another student of Brentano’s, Edmund Husserl, realizes that one must distinguish between the *content of a mental act, on the one hand, and the intention or object of the act, on the other. And just as it does for Husserl, who discovers *phenomen- ology, this distinction eventually opens up for Meinong a new field of philosophical inquiry, namely, his so-called theory of objects. In 1894 there appeared a rather slim book by Kasimir Twardowski, another student of Brentano’s, which greatly influenced the course of philosophy: On the Content and Object of Presentations (tr. R. Grossmann (The Hague, 1977)). In this book, Twardowski argued that the object of a mental act is not ‘immanent’ in the act, that is, is not a part of the act. He therefore distinguished between the individual mental act, its content, and its object. Even more importantly, Twardowski argued that the question whether or not an act has an object must be sharply distin- guished from the question whether or not the object exists. And he held that even though every mental act has an object or intention, many of these objects do not exist at all. Meinong adopts Twardowski’s distinction as well as his contention that there are many objects (of acts) which do not exist. By adopting Twardowski’s view, Meinong breaks out of the idealistic prison: a presentation, as a men- tal act with a content, can now be clearly separated from the object which it intends. At about the same time, 1899, Meinong also realizes that his implicit *ontology is much richer than the explicit one consisting of nothing but property instances com- bined with places and moments. It comprises also com- plexes of property instances (or properties) and relations. With this realization, Meinong’s eyes are opened to his own and other philosopher’s ontological commitments. From now on, Meinong’s philosophical inquiries are pri- marily ontological inquiries. Meinong’s most famous book is called On Assumptions (Über Annahmen). The first edition appeared in 1902; the second and more important one in 1910. The topic indi- cated by its title hardly warrants its fame. The discovery of one more kind of mental act is not the most exciting thing in philosophy. But the title is misleading. What Meinong really discovers, and finally fully appreciates in the second edition, is the *category of states of affairs, what he calls ‘Objektives’. With the discovery of the category of states of affairs as the intentions of judgements and assumptions, Meinong, just like Husserl, breaks decisively with Brentano’s philosophy, according to which only individ- ual things exist. But Meinong’s fame, unfortunately, does not rest on this epochal ontological discovery—think of Wittgen- stein’s later pronouncement that the world is a collection of facts, not of things—but on Meinong’s view about intentional objects and their properties. Like many recent philosophers, Meinong distinguished between two modes of *being. Let us call them existence and subsistence. Things that are located in space and/or time are said to exist. Things which are not in space and 582 Meinong, Alexius time subsist. For example, individual things exist; the rela- tion of equality between property instances, on the other hand, subsists. Now, it is clear that there are intentional objects before a mind which neither exist nor subsist, for example, the golden mountain of which someone may be thinking. And this raises the important question whether this intentional object has perhaps a third mode of being. The most important argument that speaks for such a fur- ther mode of being starts from the fact that there subsists, according to Meinong, the fact (objective) that the golden mountain does not exist. If one assumes that something can only be a constituent of a fact if it has some sort of being, then it follows immediately that the golden moun- tain must have being of some sort. Or else, it seems, one must reject this principle and assume that something can be a constituent of a fact even if it has no being at all. Meinong discusses this issue extensively and arrives at the conclusion that the principle must be rejected. Of course, one can escape from the apparent dilemma in Russell’s way, namely, by showing that the golden mountain is not a constituent of the fact that the golden mountain does not exist. Meinong does not take this way out. But, contrary to a common misunderstanding, he does not hold that the golden mountain has some kind of being. However, Meinong does hold a view that is highly sus- pect, namely the view that the golden mountain, even though it has no being, is nevertheless golden and a moun- tain. Things without being, in short, are held to have cer- tain quite ordinary properties. I think that it is this view which is most characteristic of Meinong’s metaphysics. And it is this view which leads him to claim that there is a whole field of inquiry which has been neglected by philoso- phy, namely, the so-called theory of objects. The golden mountain, for example, is an intentional object of the mind. Now, if it has no properties, as one is apt to assume, then there can be no theory about it, no informative truths would be forthcoming. Only if one assumes, as Meinong does, that such intentional objects have a number of prop- erties, can there be knowledge about them. In a review (Mind (1905)) of one of Meinong’s works, Bertrand Russell raises two objections against Meinong’s claim that non-existent objects have common properties. Firstly, Russell objects that if impossible objects, like the round square, really had the properties Meinong attrib- utes to them, like being both round and square, then such objects would violate the law of contradiction. Meinong, in reply, readily admits that this is the case, but points out that nobody has ever tried to apply this law to anything but the actual or possible (Über die Stellung der Gegenständ- stheorie im System der Wissenschaften (Leipzig, 1907)). Con- tradictory things, in other words, quite obviously must violate the law of contradiction or they would not be what they are. Perhaps Russell thought that his objection had some force because he thought of logic, at that time, not just as applying to what there is, but as encompassing everything. Russell’s second objection, however, is to the point, and Meinong devotes several paragraphs to it. If the round square is really round and square, then the existing round square, according to Russell, must also exist. But this is absurd. The round square does not exist. Meinong tries to escape from this objection by distinguishing between ordinary existence and the ‘existential determination’ to be existing. The latter, he claims, behaves like an ordinary property in that just as the golden mountain is golden, so the existing golden mountain has the existential determin- ation of being existing. It follows that the existing golden mountain is existing, but it does not exist. In a letter to Meinong, Russell replies that he cannot see how one can distinguish between ‘to exist’ and ‘to be existing’. It may be thought that Meinong could have avoided Russell’s objection without the dubious distinction between existence and to be existing by claiming that existence is not a property like being made from gold or being a mountain. While it is true that the golden moun- tain is golden and the round square is round, it is not the case that the existing golden mountain exists, since existence is not a property. In a way, Meinong makes this move. He holds that while the golden mountain is golden, the existing golden mountain does not exist. But then he adds the so-called existential determination to be existing, and this addition seems merely to cloud the issue. Why does Meinong think that there is a property which somehow corresponds to existence without being existence? An answer follows from Meinong’s accept- ance of the so-called principle of unlimited freedom of assumption, according to which one can think not only of a round square, but even of an existing round square. Clearly, to think of an existing round square is not the same as to think of a round square. Therefore, the objects before the mind must be different in these two cases. Meinong has to introduce the existential determination in order to distinguish the one intentional object from the other. In view of these and other difficulties, why is Meinong so convinced that the golden mountain is made from gold and that the round square is both round and square? Surely, this view is rather implausible, to say the least. I think that he may have been misled by his conception of individual objects as complexes of property instances (or of properties). The complex object which is the golden mountain must obviously consist, among other things, of the property of being golden. Now, if inclusion in a com- plex is conceived of as predication, then it follows imme- diately that the complex which is the golden mountain, since it contains the property of being golden, must be golden. Hence one arrives at the view that every complex, no matter what its ontological status may be, must have the properties which constitute it. r.g. Meinong’s works have been collected in a Gesamtausgabe, 7 vols. (Graz, 1968–78). Some of them have been translated into English, e.g. ‘Über Gegenstandstheorie’, tr. I. Levi as ‘The Theory of Objects’, in R. M. Chisholm (ed.), Realism and the Background of Phenomenology (New York, 1960); also Über Annahmen, 2nd edn., tr. J. Heanue as On Assumptions (Berkeley, Calif., 1983). Books about Meinong’s philosophy: Meinong, Alexius 583 J. N. Findlay, Meinong’s Theory of Objects and Values (Oxford, 1963). R. Grossmann, Meinong (London, 1974). Richard Routley, Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond (Canberra, 1980). Melissus ( fl. c.440 bc). Metaphysician of the Eleatic group (he also had success as a naval commander). While the ground-plan of his philosophical treatise seems to have followed that of Parmenides, he diverged in significant ways. He freely applied spatial and temporal predicates to his reality, suggesting that it stood closer to the world of ordinary experience. Yet his criticism of sense-perception was much more radical than that of Parmenides: he argued not merely that it is not a means to knowledge, but that it is necessarily illusory. e.l.h. *Eleatics. G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philoso- phers, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1983), 390–401. Mellor, D. H. (1938– ). British metaphysician and philoso- pher of science, noted for his work on chance and prob- ability, dispositional properties and laws of nature, the problem of induction, and the philosophy of *time. Mellor rejects the dynamic view of time which regards temporal becoming as an objectively real phenomenon. He denies that there are any tensed facts (that is, facts involving pastness or futurity), while conceding that tensed beliefs are not translatable into tenseless beliefs and are indispensable for practical reason and action. Accord- ing to Mellor it is tenseless facts which make tensed beliefs true, the key to this possibility being the indexical charac- ter of tensed expressions like ‘now’ and ‘yesterday’. He endorses McTaggart’s argument that tensed language, construed purely realistically, leads to contradiction. Unusually for an adherent of the tenseless view of time, Mellor rejects the doctrine of temporal parts, which holds that persisting objects consist of spatio-temporally continu- ous and causally connected stages or time-slices. Mellor extends his approach to indexical language to first-person expressions like ‘I’, as part of an overall metaphysical view which is naturalistic and scientifically informed and yet sceptical of physicalist and reductionist dogmas. Mellor’s approach to issues concerning belief and action, probability and induction, and causality and nat- ural law follows recognizably in the Cambridge tradition of F. P. Ramsey and Richard Braithwaite, whose work he has done much to promote. His Cambridge inaugural lec- ture, ‘The Warrant of Induction’ (1988), provides new insight into the solution of an old problem by setting it within the context of an externalist approach to know- ledge and warranted belief. This, along with his defence of dispositions and of objective chance in terms of *propen- sities, marks him off as a metaphysical realist well able to counter the subjectivist and relativist leanings of many other leading philosophers of science. e.j.l. D. H. Mellor, Real Time (Cambridge, 1981). —— Matters of Metaphysics (Cambridge, 1991). memory. To have a good memory is to be able to remem- ber many things, accurately and easily. But what is it to remember anything at all? Evidently the past comes in somehow. A creature with no past, assuming such a crea- ture is possible, would have no memories, even if it had some innate knowledge of facts about the past, or vivid and unexplainably accurate images of past events; this fol- lows simply from the logic of the words ‘memory’ and ‘remember’. What one remembers may refer to, though it cannot be in, the future: one can remember that one will die, but not one’s own death. But perhaps one can only remember what one previously knew? Certainly this will not be sufficient; a teacher who forgets the things he taught and relearns them later from his pupils is not remembering, even though he not only previously knew what he now knows but only knows it now because he knew it previously. A pure causal theory of remembering, then, whereby to remember something is to have known it in the past and to be caused by this to know it now, is not enough. Perhaps one cannot remember a fact without having previously known it, but if I remember to turn the gas out I need only have previously intended to turn it out—I need not have known something; but the previous intention must not be completely irrelevant to my present condition. Some link then is needed, and though caus- ation may not be enough, if we abandon it what can replace it? But if we keep it what form can it take? Perhaps that of some trace in the brain (but see Bursen, Dismantling the Memory Machine)? Memory, especially of past events which we not only previously knew about but experienced, often seems to involve images: in trying to remember something we think we succeed if we can form an *image of it. But how can we distinguish remembering it from imagining it? No property intrinsic to the image itself will do, even if we could find one that belonged to all and only memories (of the relevant kind), for how could such a property tell us that something outside the image (the event in question) was real and not imaginary? It is true that a memory may suddenly come upon us in the form of an image, but it is not the image’s vividness that makes it a memory, and when we try to remember something we are not looking for an image to tell us about the past, for how would we know what to look for? Rather we must already know what happened in order to create the image, or vet those images that come before us. To remember an event (as opposed to remembering the fact that it occurred) we must have experienced it, and so perhaps remembering it involves remembering our experiencing of it, which involves somehow reproducing it, and how could we reproduce it except by an image? This may be where images are important for memory, but the image still need not constitute the memory. It will probably be both inaccurate and incomplete, and I may know this. The most we can say seems to be that remembering an experience must include having some sort of an image which can be regarded as corresponding to it to some degree. 584 Meinong, Alexius As the above illustrates, memory is of various kinds. As well as facts, events, people, places, and experiences, one can remember how things looked, where to find them, what to do with them, to do something, and also how to do it; this last (remembering how) has sometimes been singled out for special contrast with another kind involv- ing images (Bergson, Russell), but without much justifica- tion, one might think (see Holland, ‘The Empiricist Theory of Memory’). a.r.l. *quasi-memory; mnemic causation. H. A. Bursen, Dismantling the Memory Machine (Dordrecht, 1978). R. F. Holland, ‘The Empiricist Theory of Memory’, Mind (1954); repr. in S. Hampshire (ed.), Philosophy of Mind (New York, 1966). Includes discussion of images. E. F. Zemach, ‘A Definition of Memory’, Mind (1968) (the mis- printed reference to Urmson on p. 535 should be to Mind (1967); Urmson replies in Mind (1971)). Mencius (4th century bc). Confucian thinker in China probably best known for his view that human nature is good. His full name was Meng K’o and he was also known as Meng Tzu˘ (Master Meng), latinized as Mencius. He defended the ethical and political ideal of Confucius against challenges from rival schools of thought, and his teachings are recorded in the Meng Tzu˘, a collection of his sayings and conversations with disciples, friends, rulers, and philosophical adversaries. According to him, all human beings share certain ethical predispositions such as an affective concern for others, a sense of shame, love for parents, and respect for elders. The Confucian ideal is a full realization of such predispositions, and self-cultivation involves nurturing them to make possible their full development. k l.s. Mencius, tr. D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth, 1970). Mendelssohn, Moses (1729–86). Jewish *Enlightenment philosopher, a Leibnizian who admired Spinoza and Maimonides, and was the model for Nathan the Wise in Lessing’s play of that name. Supplementing his Hebrew education by learning High German, Latin, Greek, French, and English, Mendelssohn won the Berlin compe- tition (1764) in which Kant took honourable mention. His defence of immortality (Phaedon (1776)) won him fame. His Jerusalem (1783) brilliantly exposes as incoherent the idea of spiritual authority. His German Pentateuch anchored the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah). His vision of humanity’s vocation to unending progress profoundly influenced Kant, who became his lifelong friend. Mendelssohn is credited with distinguishing beauty from metaphysical perfection, arguing that the latter is unity in multiplicity, known in its purity only to God; the former is a human substitute based on our introducing an artificial uniformity into those objects we perceive as wholes. Man- aging a silk firm and forced by Christian controversialists into extended defences of his loyalty to Judaism, Mendelssohn lost his health, but campaigned heroically against the civil disabilities imposed on Jews, especially the invidious requirements regarding oaths. His son, a banker, raised his son Felix as a Christian, composer of the Reformation Symphony. l.e.g. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn (Philadelphia, 1973). Meno’s puzzle: see learning paradox. men’s rights: see masculism. mental acts: see acts, mental. mental causation. It is a prevalent view that mental events or states, e.g. desires and beliefs, contribute causally to the bodily movements involved in action. Descartes, holding that mental states are non-material, thought the point of interaction was the pineal gland. As against this, it is often held nowadays that the notion of non-physical interference is incoherent, since the phys- ical world is a closed system. So Davidson, working with this assumption, has argued that in order for mental states to produce their physical effects they must themselves be physical. However, dissatisfaction with Davidson’s theory arises from three points: (i) Davidson denies the existence of strict *psychophysical laws, (ii) mental states, even if phys- ical, have mental properties, and (iii) mental states explain action in virtue of their mental properties, which should therefore be assigned a causal role. The objection is that Davidson cannot do justice to this last requirement because of (i), and much current debate has turned on the task of trying to resolve this issue. Some reject (i), holding that there are psychophysical laws, albeit with ceteris paribus clauses attached (Fodor)— a view that is challenged by Schiffer. Crane and Mellor reject the physicalist closed-system assumption, arguing that psycho-physical laws are every bit as genuine as the laws of physics. An alternative position (Honderich) holds a *union theory according to which mental and neural states operate together as a pair in causal transactions. Dretske has a structural-cause theory: he fixes on the mental as a representational property of beliefs and holds that it operates, not as the neural event which triggers an appropriate bodily movement, but as the structuring cause which contributes to the setting-up of appropriate neural-event → bodily-movement connections. Mental causation remains very much a subject of live debate. o.r.j. *volition; will. Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1980). John Heil and Alfred Mele (eds.), Mental Causation (Oxford, 1993). mental events. Deciding what counts as a mental event is not easy. The efficacy of tests like the event’s being imma- terial, subjective, private, or incorrigibly known have been hotly disputed. A *privileged-access criterion seems best for sensations, but not for acquiring intentions, beliefs, or desires. Brentano’s criterion of intentionality fares better here. This test requires that certain implica- tions of existence or identity do not follow from mental events 585 attribution of mental events. Falling into Lake Wobegone implies that it exists, but forming an intention to find Lake Wobegone does not (nor that it doesn’t). Again, hitting Ali implies that I hit Clay (Clay and Ali are identical), not so if I acquire a desire to hit Ali (I might be unaware of the iden- tity). Thus falling and hitting are not mental events; acquiring intentions and desires are. Having an intention (contrast forming one), or having a belief (contrast acquiring one) are reckoned to be *mental states rather than events, but if the above-mentioned cri- teria are good for mental events they are good equally for mental states. o.r.j. *dualism; functionalism; materialism; physicalism. Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1980). mental indispensability. The claim of mental indispens- ability or mental efficacy is that reference to mental events is an essential part of any correct full explanation of behav- iour and of the occurrence of other mental events. It has seemed plausible to take the contribution of mental events to be causal. In which case, the claim that the men- tal is indispensable is a recognition of its causal efficacy and is a denial of *epiphenomenalism. p.j.p.n. *mental causation. T. Honderich, A Theory of Determinism (Oxford, 1988), ch. 2. mentality. The attribute of having a mind, but what are minds? As many use the word, the *mind is the apparatus or mechanism or inner works which explains how humans are capable of such things as action, rationality, emotion, perception, and imagination. In that sense it has been dis- covered to be (roughly) the brain or central nervous sys- tem, and the remarkable properties of this mind–brain have become the target for the most exciting research pro- jects of our time. Others use the word as a shorthand way of talking of those capacities and features which qualify us as distinctively human. Thus there are conceptual debates about the nature and relative importance of rationality, agency, free will, consciousness, social awareness, cap- acity for abstract thought, and so on. These are elucidations of and suggestions about everyday notions which devel- oped from social interactions in response to practical needs and interests. If listing these qualities gives what makes us human, thereby revealing our mentality, it is not the sense in which brain researchers investigate the men- tal, for they are interested in what makes us human in a causal or theoretical way. Our everyday minds are what they seek to explain by their interesting discoveries about the scientific mind. In the theoretical or scientific sense, most of us know very little about minds. But in the descriptive or everyday sense, we all know a great deal about them, including and especially our own. Philosophy sometimes just articulates an unwarranted fear of drowning when it seeks to put limits on what brain research could show, but some of its warnings may be salutary. Successive and transient inter- nal models of the scientific mind have been based on available technology, such as clocks, hydraulic robots, telephone exchanges, *computers, and *programs. It is fair criticism to point out when these fall short of simulat- ing human powers. Homing rockets do not exhibit purposes as we do, pocket calculators do not show math- ematical intelligence, and so on. Also, by comparing the performance of machines with human performance, we can sharpen our everyday acquaintance with what is involved in the latter. Delineation of everyday mentality is both essential to and aided by the attempt to model how it works. It is tempting to help the mechanical models out with internal directors or subagents in order to get them to work as explanations of what people do. This is harmless as a linguistic place-holding device, indicating just where more work on the mechanism needs to be done. But it is damaging if the internal operators are transformed into Cartesian *egos, the kind of invisible metaphysical con- troller which Ryle caricatured as the *ghost in the machine. The trouble is that such things are inaccessible (at least in practice), their form or location being unspeci- fied, and there is a danger of endowing them with the kind of powers the mechanism was introduced to explain, thereby duplicating the explanatory project. What locks the myth of Cartesian egos into place is that we suppose that our knowledge of our own unscientific minds is yielded by a species of continuous inner percep- tion. Our being conscious, it is easy to think, consists in introspecting what goes on in our thinking, feeling, and willing parts. Then it looks as is if we all have a hot-line either to the Cartesian ego or to the machinery which the brain researchers posit in their latest models. The every- day and the scientific concepts of mind seem to converge, though it will usually be said that we have access only to a small part of our minds, the bit of the electronic iceberg above the surface. As if someone who tells you what is in her mind and the brain researcher who tells you how her mind works are reporting on the same subject-matter (observed, no doubt, from a different ‘aspect’). In my view, this perceptual view of consciousness as *introspection is a mistake. When we give our motives, state our beliefs, express how we feel, announce the course of our deliberations, or reveal our imaginings, we are not at all describing our scientific minds ‘from a sub- jective point of view’, but providing more evidence about how our everyday minds work. The sense in which every- day thoughts may be revealed or hidden is not the sense in which brain mechanisms may be revealed or hidden, and our interpretion of puzzling behaviour by our friends is not in competition with the explanations of brain researchers. On any view, adjudicating skirmishes at the boundaries between the everyday and the scientific con- cepts of mentality remains important philosophical work. j.e.r.s. *mind, syntax, and semantics; mind–body problem; mind, problems of the philosophy of; mind, history of the philosophy of; inner sense. 586 mental events D. C. Dennett, Brainstorms (Brighton, 1979). R. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1642), in many edns. and translations, e.g. E. Anscombe and P. T. Geach, Descartes: Philosophical Writings (London, 1954). G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, 1949). mental reductionism. Reductionism about a given sub- ject-matter X is the claim that facts about X can be ‘reduced’ to—that is, can be shown or construed to be— facts about another subject-matter Y (‘the reduction base’). Reductionism in philosophy of mind is the claim that facts about mentality are reducible to physical facts, i.e. facts about matter and material processes. What is required to implement mind–body reduction? According to the *dualism of Descartes, minds exist as ‘mental substances’, objects wholly outside the physical domain. On this view, facts about mentality would be physically irreducible since they would be facts about these immaterial entities. The first requirement for mind–body reduction, therefore, is the renouncement of minds as non-physical objects. This can be done either by identifying minds with brains or other appropriate phys- ical structures, or by refusing to countenance minds as substantival entities and attributing mental properties to organisms and other physical systems. In either case, it is physical systems that have psychological properties. The remaining step in mind–body reduction concerns mental properties, e.g. being in pain, sensing a green patch, believing that snow is cold, and their analogues in systematic psychology. Let M be a mental property: the physical reduction of M is usually thought to require a ‘physical correlate’ of M, i.e. a physical property with which M is necessarily coextensive. When a pervasive sys- tem of physical correlates is found for mental properties, mental properties could, it is thought, be identified with their physical correlates. *Logical behaviourism sought to reduce mental prop- erties by defining them in terms of behaviours and behav- ioural dispositions. Although mentality seems intimately tied to behaviour, it is now widely agreed that mental terms resist behavioural definitions. The demise of behav- iouristic reductionism has led to the hope that the mental might be physically reduced through empirical laws con- necting mental and physical properties. Nomological reduction of mental properties would proceed by provid- ing for each mental property M a nomologically coexten- sive physical property P—that is, where ‘M occurs if and only if P occurs’ holds as a matter of empirical law. Accord- ing to the *identity theory of mind, every mental property has a neural correlate with which it is to be identified; if pain is uniformly correlated as a matter of law with, say, the activation of c-fibres, pain may be reductively identi- fied with c-fibre activation, and similarly for other mental properties and kinds. The significance of mind–body reduction is claimed to be twofold: ontological economy and unity of theory. By dispensing with minds as substances of a special sort and their irreducibly psychic features, we simplify our ontology. By construing mental properties as complex neural properties and taking physical organisms as their bearers, psychology can be integrated with the underlying biological and physical sciences. Two lines of consideration have been responsible for the decline of reductionism. One is psychophysical anom- alism, the claim that there are no laws connecting mental and physical phenomena, and hence no laws of the sort required for the nomological reduction of the former to the latter. The other is the *variable (or multiple) realiz- ability of mental properties. If a mental property is multi- ply realized by a variety of physical properties in diverse species and structures, it could not, the argument goes, be identified with any single physical property. These consid- erations have led many philosophers to favour non- reductive physicalism (*mind–body problem; *physicalism; *functionalism), the doctrine that although all the individ- uals of this world are physical, certain properties of these individuals, in particular their psychological properties, are not reducible to physical properties. j.k. D. Davidson, ‘Mental Events’, in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1980). J. Fodor, ‘Special Sciences, or the Disunity of Science as a Work- ing Hypothesis’, Synthese (1974). J. Kim, ‘The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism’, in Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge, 1993). T. Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, Philosophical Review (1974). mental states. A disputed notion. Many philosophers have held that beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. are real states, but have disagreed profoundly on their nature, some maintaining that they are non-material states (Descartes) and others that they must be physical states if interactions with sense-organs and bodily movements are to be possible. Tough materialists (Churchland) hold that talk of such states will become dispensable in favour of neural descriptions, while others (Dennett) concede the non-reality of mental states but hold that use of psycho- logical terms is indispensable. Ryle held that belief-claims are really claims about *dispositions to behaviour, but Arthur Collins has recently argued they are epistemic risk claims—‘I believe that p’ means ‘p and I am right, or not-p and I am wrong’—with no reference to a state involved. For questions about criteria for mental states, see the entry on mental events. The above disputes extend to the notion of mental events, since most mental events are reckoned to be the arrival or cessation of mental states. o.r.j. *dualism; functionalism; materialism; physicalism. Arthur Collins, The Nature of Mental Things (Notre Dame, Ind., 1987). Peter Smith and O. R. Jones, The Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, 1986). mereology. Mereology is the formal theory of part–whole relations, whose early developers included Les´niewski, Tarski, and Goodman. The standard theory regards any whole as identical with the sum of its parts and mereology 587 consequently identifies any two objects containing all and only the same parts. This makes it difficult to accommo- date the case of organic wholes, such as living organisms, which can survive the replacement of some of their parts and consequently cannot be identified at any one time with the sum of their concurrently existing parts. How- ever, modal and temporal extensions of the standard the- ory promise solutions to such difficulties. The relationship of a whole to its proper parts is import- antly different from that of a set to its members, though David Lewis has recently argued that a set may be regarded as the mereological sum of its unit subsets. e.j.l. *thing. D. K. Lewis, Parts of Classes (Oxford, 1991). P. M. Simons, Parts: A Study in Ontology (Oxford, 1987). meritocracy. Any society that creates an élite by suitable rewards based on accomplishments that distinguish some from others is a meritocracy. Thus it has been described as a society characterized by ‘careers open to talents’ ( John Rawls). The aristocracy of merit is thought to be natural, since it is grounded on the exercise of esteem-worthy per- sonal traits. Merit is definable as the superior productivity or performance that results when intelligence is joined with effort, popularized in the formula I + E = M (Michael Young). A meritocracy requires equality of opportunity and some form of central planning; it must prohibit egalitarian levelling as well as any form of nepo- tism or hereditary aristocracy. h.a.b. *aristocracy, natural; conservatism; élites; élitism. Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870–2033 (London, 1958). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1907–61). French phenomen- ologist and co-founder with Sartre of existential philoso- phy. Merleau-Ponty’s constant target was the subject– object *dualism of *Cartesianism, which arguably still continued to dominate Sartre’s existentialism. Drawing on Husserl’s notion of a pre-predicative *intentionality and on Heidegger’s exposition of human existence as being-in-the-world, Merleau-Ponty developed a descrip- tion of the world as the field of experience in which I find myself. Descartes’s Cogito was transformed to read ‘I belong to myself while belonging to the world’. Any attempt to constitute the world as an object of knowledge is always derivative in relation to that primary access to the world that Merleau-Ponty located in the body. Phenomenology of Perception (1945) established Merleau- Ponty as the pre-eminent philosopher of the body. The body is neither subject, nor object, but an ambiguous mode of existence that infects all knowledge. Merleau- Ponty drew on the critical examination of contemporary psychology and physiology presented in his first book, The Structure of Behaviour (1942), to argue the primacy of per- ception. Merleau-Ponty questioned the attempt of trad- itional philosophy to look to *perception to provide some guarantees that mark its difference from hallucination. What is given in perception is ambiguous. However, this does not lead to scepticism, any more than does the experi- ence of disillusionment. The discovery that one was the victim of an illusion does not challenge faith in perception altogether. It is only in the name of a new perception that a previous perception is doubted. Merleau-Ponty distinguished what reflection reveals from what is given in unreflective experience. This led him to the idea of a radical reflection. Radical reflection was Merleau-Ponty’s alternative to *analysis, which he consistently criticized. Analytic thought on his view breaks up experience into constituents, for example sensa- tions and qualities, and is thus obliged to invent a power of synthesis in an attempt to rebuild the world of experience. In spite of this, his work has found a more receptive audi- ence among analytic philosophers than other phenomen- ologists have managed to receive. Throughout his writings Merleau-Ponty sought ways to explore the body’s primordial contact with the world prior to the impact of analysis. In doing so, he was resisting a tendency of contemporary scientific and philosophic thought to valorize autonomous knowledge arrived at under experimental conditions. In the late essay ‘Eye and Mind’ (1961) Merleau-Ponty turned to painting for evi- dence of the character of the body’s relation to the world, evidence that provides no consolation for those in search of definitive conclusions. A similar conclusion arose from his studies on language that introduced Saussurean lin- guistics into phenomenology. In the abandoned manu- script ‘The Prose of the World’ and in the collection of essays Signs (1960) Merleau-Ponty challenged the ideal of an algorithmic language. In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty introduced the notion of flesh in a new attempt to explore the sense in which the seer is caught up in what he or she sees. Mer- leau-Ponty had come to recognize his earlier conception of the body as still tied to the dualistic metaphysics he was committed to challenging. For that reason flesh was not presented in opposition either to the mind or to the world, but as an element, much as air and water are elements. Unfortunately, the book was still incomplete at the time of his death. Scholars have had to rely heavily on his working notes in order to assess the extent to which the emphasis on ontology in The Visible and the Invisible represents a departure from his earlier phenomenological studies and not just their fulfilment. r.l.b. M. Langer, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (Tallahas- see, Fla., 1989). G. B. Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (Athens, Oh., 1981). E. Matthews, The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (London, 2002). M. Merleau-Ponty, Basic Writings (London, 2003). meta-ethics is the philosophical study of the nature of moral judgement. So, instead of being concerned with questions of what actually is right or wrong (or good or bad), it is concerned with the meaning or significance of 588 mereology calling something right or wrong (or good or bad). Since both of these kinds of inquiry can properly be called ethics, the term meta-ethics may be used more precisely to denote the latter kind. Meta-ethics includes both the meaning of moral terms and also such questions as whether moral judgements are objective or subjective. It also includes others of the *problems of moral philosophy. r.h. *moral philosophy, history of; emotivism; prescrip- tivism; moral realism. metalanguage. The one in which the properties of a lan- guage under study, the object language, are stated. The metalanguage may be identical to the object language, as when the grammatical properties of English are stated in English, but it is often distinct from the object language. According to an influential view of Tarski, some semantic properties of a language L can be expressed only in a dis- tinct metalanguage, not in L itself. a.gup. A. Tarski, ‘The Semantic Conception of Truth’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (1944). metalogic. The mathematical and philosophical study of the components of systems of logic. Examples include rig- orous analyses of notions like logical consequence, *deduction, *logical form, *satisfaction, and *denotation. A typical result of metalogic is a *completeness theorem establishing that a model-theoretic notion of consequence is captured by the arguments derivable in a given deduc- tive system. s.s. *logical theory. Stephen Kleene, Introduction to Metamathematics (Amsterdam, 1952). metaphilosophy. The philosophy of philosophy. Philoso- phy is the attempt to solve philosophical problems. ‘What is philosophy?’ is itself a philosophical problem, so metaphilosophy is essentially the attempt to solve that problem. On metaphysical conceptions of philosophy, philoso- phy is the attempt to describe reality as opposed to appear- ance. For example, Plato draws a distinction between the world of doxa (belief, opinion) and the world of episte¯me¯ (knowledge). The perfect, unchanging eidea (Forms, essences) which exist independently of minds and spatio- temporal objects are the true objects of philosophical study. By this picture, Plato reconciled the competing views of his Pre-Socratic predecessors Parmenides, according to whom there is only unchanging being, and Heraclitus, according to whom there is only becoming, or the transition between being and nothingness. Arguably, Augustine’s distinction between the city of God and the earthly city, Descartes’s distinction between mental and physical substances, Leibniz’s postulation of monads, Spinoza’s one substance, Schopenhauer’s Wille and (partly malgré eux) Hegel’s Geist (Spirit) and Heidegger’s Sein (Being) are metaphysical doctrines in this broad sense. On anti-metaphysical conceptions of philosophy, knowledge of reality is impossible, either because of the constraints of the senses or because it leads to contradic- tions or because it deploys terminology beyond the limits of significance. Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, in very different ways, regard knowledge as constrained by possible sense perception. Kant thinks the attempt to do metaphysics generates seemingly valid pairs of arguments with mutually exclusive conclusions called ‘antinomies’. Since Kant, philosophy has operated within a Kantian anti-metaphysical paradigm. Because metaphysical phil- osophy is allegedly impossible, attempts have been made to replace it by something else: the overthrow of capitalist society (*Marxism), the description of appearances (*phe- nomenology), natural science (*Logical Positivism), the description of conceptual schemes (*structuralism), the analysis of the meanings of ordinary language (*linguistic philosophy), literary criticism (*post-structuralism). In medieval Christian, Jewish, and Islamic philosophy the true object of study is *God. However, faith and *revelation are needed because the powers of the finite human intellect are inadequate tools of theological understanding. Non-Western philosophy exhibits the same tension between metaphysics and anti-metaphysics. The inconsistencies between, say, Taoism and Confucianism, or Tibetan Buddhism and Indian materialism, are at least as difficult to reconcile as those between, say, Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Hume or Hegel and the Logical Positivists. It is not true that all and only Western philoso- phy is naturalist and anti-metaphysical and all and only Eastern philosophy is spiritualist and metaphysical. Whitehead famously said that Western philosophy could be understood as a series of *footnotes to Plato. It is certainly not misconstrued as an oscillation between Pla- tonic metaphysics and Aristotelian naturalism. In philoso- phy, the twentieth century was an Aristotelian age. s.p. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 2nd edn. (Harmondsworth, 1976). Charles J. Bontempo and S. Jack Odell (eds.), The Owl of Minerva (New York, 1975). Martin Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, tr. W. Kluback and J. T. Wilde (New York, 1958). John Hospers, An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (London, 1997). Anthony Kenny, A Brief History of Western Philosophy (Oxford, 1998). metaphor. The starting-point for philosophical discus- sion of metaphor is whether or not metaphors are para- phrasable in literal terms. On what has been called the ‘substitution theory’ a metaphor is assumed to stand in for a literal equivalent. The metaphor ‘Achilles is a lion’ can be teased out to give ‘Achilles is like a lion in respect of the following features . . . ’. However, after Max Black’s influ- ential paper in which he proposed what he called an ‘inter- action’ theory, philosophers have become acutely aware of the way in which different hearers or readers pick out metaphor 589 . and theological enquiry. duns scotus was called Doctor Subtilis for his subtle re- conciliation of Aristotelian philosophy with the doctrines of the Franciscan monastic tradition. medieval philosophy who. that the eternity of the world was neither prov- able nor disprovable. His teacher, Albert the Great, held, to the contrary, that Aristotle’s position on this matter was false, and that the doctrine. relation of asso- ciation which binds the various instances together into a complex. And thirdly, there is the part whole relation between an instance and the complex to which it belongs. This relation