any claim about the world. Subjectivists, by contrast, deflated ethics by treating moral and evaluative claims as mere descriptions of the emotions or preferences of speak- ers—‘this is good’ being equivalent in meaning to ‘I like (or prefer) this’. Finally, prescriptivists likened moral and indeed all evaluative claims to imperatives—‘this is good (or right)’ being regarded as meaning the same as ‘choose this (sort of thing)!’—and sought to induce a certain ration- ality into moral discourse via a logic of imperatives. More recently, meta-ethicists have focused more directly on the question whether moral and other value- claims correspond to reality or are in any sense objective, and there have been a wide variety of different and oppos- ing responses to that question. Given the apparent wide- spread disagreement about ethical (and other) values that has existed between different societies and different epochs of the same society, there is reason to wonder whether there really are any facts or truths for ethics to dis- cover, and although most ethicists ever since Socrates have tended to believe in one or another form of moral objectivity, the problem remains of justifying such object- ivity in the face of continually different forms of scepti- cism about its possibility. However, in addition to meta-ethical questions, ethics naturally leads to certain substantive (non-semantical) metaphysical issues, and perhaps most important among these is the question of *free will. If human beings lack free will, then, it has traditionally been argued, they cannot be held responsible for their actions and cannot be bound by moral obligations any more than animals or small chil- dren are. So those who have systematically elaborated one or another view of moral right and wrong and of human good have also usually thought it necessary to defend (or at least explicitly assume) the existence of human free- dom, and that defence, in the first instance, has usually involved saying something about freedom in relation to causal *determinism. If the universe is universally gov- erned by causal laws, then human freedom would seem to be very much in jeopardy. So defenders of morality typ- ically feel called upon either to deny determinism and argue that human beings are in important ways not sub- ject to causal determination or else to show that causal determinism does not in fact deprive us of free agency. Another metaphysical or quasi-metaphysical issue that moral philosophers have devoted attention to concerns the human capacity for morality. Most moral codes and moral philosophies require, for example, that people occasionally put aside self-interest in the name of honour, fairness, decency, loyalty, or the general good, but if one is a psychological egoist, one will hold that people lack the capacity for these forms of self-sacrifice, and it then becomes problematic whether human beings really have the obligations that various ethically non-egoistic theories or views claim they do. As a result, psychological egoism, most notably at the hands of Bishop Butler, has been the target of philosophical criticisms on the part of philoso- phers wishing to defend one or another substantive, eth- ically non-egoistic morality. But even if one rejects both forms of egoism, there are questions about how much morality validly or fairly can demand of people, and some of these issues arise in con- nection with utilitarianism and Kantianism. Utilitarianism is usually stated in a ‘maximizing’ form that treats it as a necessary and sufficient condition of right action that one do the best one circumstantially can for humankind as a whole (or for all sentient beings). But such a doctrine seems to entail that if one is in a position to relieve the suf- fering, hunger, or disease of others, one is morally obli- gated to do so, even if that means giving up one’s life plans and most of what one really cares about in life. Unless one’s current life does as much good on the whole for people, one must give up one’s life plans to the extent neces- sary to confer greater benefits on (prevent greater harm to) other people. The utilitarian moral standard is thus very demanding, and some philosophers have questioned whether morality can properly, or, one might say, fairly, require so much of people. In particular, it may be won- dered whether people, most people, have the capacity to live up to such a stringent morality as maximizing utilitar- ianism presents. Utilitarianism requires that one always do the most good one can for people and in effect leaves no room for what are called supererogatory degrees of morality, for going beyond the call of duty. And this seems too demanding because it means, in effect, that if one fails always to do the most for humankind that one can, if one isn’t like Schweitzer or Mother Teresa, one acts wrongly and fails to fulfil one’s moral obligations. Thus if ethical egoism is too undemanding, morally speaking, so too, on the other side, does utilitarianism seem too demanding upon human nature. Kantianism can likewise be seen as grating against our human nature or capacities, not by demanding too much sacrifice of self-interest, but by insisting that only moral conscientiousness is a proper and laudable moral motive. If one gives out of fellow-feeling or friendship to another human being, one’s act lacks all moral worth, according to Kant, because one’s action was not performed out of a sense of duty and respect for the moral law. Many philoso- phers have thought such a view of moral virtue to be too narrow and out of keeping with human psychology, and feminists like Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings have argued, contrary to Kant, that a morally good person will directly focus on other people and their welfare, rather than be guided by a sense of duty. In fact, there has been and remains a great deal of disagreement over what kinds of motive really are morally praiseworthy and worthy of encouragement. Today moral philosophers are very much engaged in all the kinds of issue we have discussed here. There may be no generally accepted solutions to (most of) these prob- lems, but there is also no doubt that moral philosophers have been developing a better critical understanding of their nature and of what solutions to them might look like. m.s. *moral knowledge; moral particularism; pornography. 630 moral philosophy, problems of F. Feldman, An Introduction to Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1978). P. Foot, Virtues and Vices (Berkeley, Calif., 1978). T. Hill, Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory (Ithaca, NY, 1992). L. Pojman, Ethics: Discovering Right and Wrong (Belmont, Calif., 1990). T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). S. Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Oxford, 1982). M. Slote, Morals from Motives (Oxford, 2001). J. J. C. Smart and B. A. O. Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge, 1973). B. A. O. Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (New York, 1972). moral pluralism holds that the foundational level of morality consists of a plurality of values or duties. For example, *equality and aggregate *well-being are often claimed to be values that serve as the foundation for the rest of morality. According to other pluralistic theories, the foundational level of morality is instead composed of duties not to physically harm others, not to harm or take others’ possessions, not to break one’s promises, not to tell lies, plus general duties to do good for others, and duties of extra concern for those with whom one has spe- cial connections. Different versions of moral pluralism add to or subtract from such lists of foundational duties or values. Most moral pluralists hold that we do not have strict principles of priority that will resolve all conflicts among the foundational values or duties. These moral pluralists hold that we thus to need to exercise judgement in order to resolve some conflicts among these values or duties. Giving judgement such a large role, however, strikes crit- ics of moral pluralism as failing to provide a defensible decision procedure for moral deliberation. b.h. W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford, 1930, 2002). P. Stratton-Lake (ed.), Ethical Intuitionism (Oxford, 2002). moral psychology. A part of moral theory devoted to the analysis of concepts used to describe the psychological make-up of persons as moral *agents, and the examination of normative issues involving those concepts. Some of these concepts may be explored for their own sake, e.g. the ideas of fear, anxiety, despair, or *love, and here the aim is to understand emotional states, motivations, or relationships of major importance in the lives of human beings. Moral psychology also explores moral-emotional aspects of important moral practices. When the actions of responsible persons are morally wrong, those who hold them to account typically expect the wrongdoers to experi- ence such negative moral *emotions as guilt, shame, remorse, or regret. Moral psychology attempts to under- stand the cognitive and phenomenological structures of such emotions, the differences among them, and the con- ditions under which they are justified or not. These emo- tions are usually thought of as painful, and as reflecting a change in a person’s standing in the moral community. Ordinarily, pain is construed as a condition from which a person is entitled to seek immediate relief. In the case of the negative moral emotions, then, how long must a per- son suffer them? And how may a person suffering them gain release from them, and perhaps restoration to good standing in the moral community? Here the notions of forgiveness, mercy, excuse, and repentance become important, and the practices of making amends and of moral or legal punishment need investigation. Accord- ingly, moral-psychological inquiry may lead on to the the- ory of punishment and the philosophy of law. There are positive moral-emotional states to be under- stood, too, such as the satisfaction, contentment, or pride one may take in doing right, and the humility that may be recommended when such positive states turn toward arrogance. Approaches to these issues concerning the negative and positive moral emotions may be influenced by prior inquiries into the ideas of freedom and intentional- ity, and into the logic of moral deliberation and practical reasoning. Under a wide interpretation, moral psychology may be considered to include these latter inquiries as well. n.s.c. *moral judgement; expressivism in ethics. S. W. Blackburn, Ruling Passions (Oxford, 1999). Owen Flanagan and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (eds.), Identity, Character, and Morality (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). Herbert Morris, On Guilt and Innocence (Berkeley, Calif., 1976). moral realism. The view that moral beliefs and judge- ments can be true or false, that there exist moral proper- ties to which moral agents are attentive or inattentive, sensitive or insensitive, that moral values are discovered, not willed into existence nor constituted by emotional reactions. Far from being a function of wishes, wants, and desires, moral demands furnish reasons for acting, reasons that take precedence over any other reasons. Debate cen- tres on the nature and credentials of moral properties as the moral realist understands them. In what sense are they ‘real’? Real, as irreducible to discrete affective experiences of individuals. In this and other respects they share charac- teristics of the *‘secondary qualities’ of our life-world: fil- tered by our mentality, but not on that account illusory. They can be well-founded, making a real difference to situations and individuals that possess (or lack) them. Moral realists are arguably justified in displaying the inadequacies of subjectivist moral theories; but less suc- cessful so far in developing a convincing positive account of the ‘reality’ of values. r.w.h. *truth; realism and anti-realism; emotive theory; pre- scriptivism; moral scepticism; quasi-realism. D. McNaughton, Moral Vision (Oxford, 1988). I. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London, 1970). —— Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London, 1992). G. Sayre-McCord, Essays on Moral Realism (Ithaca, NY, 1988). morals and law: see law and morals. morals, enforcement of: see enforcement of morals. morals, enforcement of 631 moral scepticism. We must distinguish two kinds of *scepticism about the possibility of objectively valid moral judgements. Internal scepticism argues that it is a mistake in moral judgement to make certain kinds of moral evaluation or criticism or (in the case of global internal scepticism) to make any such judgements at all. Examples of the latter, global scepticism, include the argument that morality is ridiculous because there is no God, that it is misconceived because all human decisions and acts are predetermined, and that it is barren because there is no point or purpose in human life anyway. Such scepticism is internal to morality because it is based on normative, eth- ical assumptions about the true or adequate ground of moral claims: it assumes that a basis for morality would exist if there were a God, or if human acts were genuinely free, or if the universe including human life could be understood as planned and purposeful. Each of these assumptions represents an abstract normative judge- ment—an assumption about the true grounds of moral commitment—even though each claims to generate scep- tical conclusions. Internal scepticism is powerful and threatening, for those who find its underlying assump- tions persuasive, because it is practical: it must change the behaviour of anyone who is converted to it. People who sincerely believe that morality is bunk because free will is an illusion must reject moral restraints for themselves, and refuse to criticize others for behaving dishonestly or in ways other people find morally wicked. External scepticism, on the other hand, is supposedly based not on abstract or general normative assumptions about the adequate grounds of moral commitment or responsibility, but rather on wholly non-moral, philo- sophical assumptions about the possibility of any kind of objective *truth or *knowledge. Contemporary examples include Gilbert Harman’s argument that moral judge- ments cannot count as objective knowledge because moral beliefs are not caused by anything in the world, and John Mackie’s argument that there cannot be moral facts because moral properties would be such ‘queer’ entities. External scepticism is widely thought to have only the- oretical rather than practical consequences—someone who is converted to the philosophical opinion that moral- ity is a matter not of objective truth or falsity but rather of subjective reaction need not, on this view, change his first- order moral convictions—he may still think that dishon- esty is detestable or that genocide is wicked—though he will now recognize that these are not ordinary beliefs about some objective reality, but are only expressions of his own subjective state of mind. It is very difficult, however, to make any real sense of the idea of external moral scepticism. Consider the state- ments that supposedly express this kind of scepticism: that genocide is not ‘really’ or ‘objectively’ immoral, or that its immorality is not ‘out there, in the universe’, or that its immorality is not ‘part of the fabric of the universe’, for example. It is, in fact, impossible to assign any sceptical sense to such philosophically loaded or metaphorical statements that does not make them equivalent in mean- ing to the simple internally sceptical statement (which is, of course, full of practical consequences) that genocide is not immoral. Since the latter is plainly a moral judgement, and could be supported, if at all, only through internally sceptical abstract moral claims of the kind I mentioned, there is no such thing as external scepticism. The only intelligible moral scepticism is internal to morality. That is an important conclusion, among other reasons because many philosophers have assumed that *subject- ivism, *relativism, and other forms of moral scepticism can be established by default; that is, that since we cannot prove that abortion or taxation or racial discrimination are or are not morally wicked to those who think the con- trary, it follows that there is no objective truth in moral matters. But if we understand the denial of objective moral truth as a piece of internal rather than supposedly external scepticism, we see that it is as much in need of a positive moral argument as any other moral position, and its supporters can no more win by default than can their non-sceptical opponents. Whether you accept some gen- eral sceptical position about morality—for example, the subjectivist position that moral obligations only hold for those who accept them, or the relativist position that moral obligations hold only within a community whose conventional morality endorses that obligation—must depend on whether you accept whatever moral argu- ments can be made for these particular forms of scepti- cism—that it is wrong to condemn people morally unless they act in a way they themselves believe to be wrong, for instance. In fact, very few people (including those philoso- phers who claim to be external sceptics) find that they can actually accept those arguments or embrace and act on the internally sceptical conclusions they recommend. r.d. *ethical objectivism; ethical relativism; moral realism. Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (Oxford, 1977). R. Joyce, The Myth of Morality (Cambridge, 2002). John Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, 1977). moral sense. ‘Moral sense’ is the name given by, for example, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume to the capacity we have to distinguish virtue from vice. Such moral philosophers are referred to as sentimentalists, because we are supposed by them to feel things to be good or bad rather than to reason that they are so. However, in Hume’s philosophy such feelings are not divorced from judgement. A feeling of admiration for virtuous action is properly called ‘moral sense’ only if it arises from disinter- ested reflection on the good tendencies of such actions in general. Moral sense, like aesthetic taste, may be ill- founded or well-founded. This view was taken for granted by, for example, Jane Austen, who thought it a fault if someone did not ‘feel as he ought’. Since the moral the- ories of Kant, however, it has generally been held that moral judgements are matters either of reason or of purely personal preference. m.warn. 632 moral scepticism *conscience; moral realism. J. L. Mackie, Hume’s Moral Theory (London, 1980). moral sentiments. States of mind associated with moral character and response, including guilt, anger, shame, pride, sympathy, hatred, resentment, and other feelings and emotions connected with approval and disapproval. According to the eighteenth-century sentimentalists, moral distinctions are explicable in terms of non-rational sentiments experienced by agents in response to states of the world, including states of character. Thus to be virtu- ous is to be such as to elicit approval or sympathy in others. On some views, including that of Hume, moral judgements of approval and disapproval are themselves a kind of experienced sentiment. The distinction between sentimentalists and their opponents is undermined by cognitivist theories of the *emotions, according to which propositionally articulated emotions are partly consti- tuted by beliefs with their own conditions of correctness. If moral sentiments have distinctive conditions of correct- ness as given by the nature of their objects, then the eight- eenth-century distinction between reason and sentiment is put into question. h.l. *Hume. J. Schneewind (ed.), Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant (Cambridge, 2003). moral virtues: see virtues. more things in heaven and earth There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. (Shakespeare, Hamlet) What Hamlet says to his friend Horatio could be an indictment of *philosophy in general or specifically of Horatio’s philosophy. Or if, as some Shakespearian scholars contend, the correct reading is ‘our’, the philosophy referred to could be that of Horatio and Hamlet, whose undergraduate faith in rationality Hamlet may be mock- ing, or of all humans. No amount of scholarship, however, will dislodge people’s tendency to counter scepticism about the supernatural, or philosophical stringency, with this quotation. The quoter usually purports to ally him or herself to ‘the Bard’, and flourishes Hamlet’s rhetoric as if it were Shakespeare’s own assertion—and decisive proof of the existence of God, the paranormal, or anything else that it is thought desirable to believe in. j.o’g. mortalism. The mortalist heresy (that human *souls are mortal—punishable by *death in the 1648 Blasphemy Ordination) was connected with a burning mid- seventeenth-century controversy: sentience requires a soul; all animals perceive; so do ‘brutes’ have immortal souls? or do we have mortal ones? Both alternatives were cham- pioned; neither was generally accepted. The mortalist Richard Overton offered a surprising compromise: body and soul both die, but both are resurrected. j.j.m. *immortality. N. T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1972). motion. x moves if and only if x is at some place, P 1 , at some time, t 1 , and x is at some numerically distinct place, P 2 , at some later time, t 2 , and x exists at some juxtaposed set of places between P 1 and P 2 and at all times between t 1 and t 2 . Philosophical problems about motion include: What is it to begin to move? How long does starting to move last? as well as the proof or refutation of both the materialist thesis that all change is motion and the Parmenidean thesis that change (and, a fortiori, motion) does not exist. Four of *Zeno’s paradoxes are philosophical problems about motion: Achilles and the tortoise, the dichotomy, the flying arrow, and the stadium. s.p. Aristotle, Physics, bks. i and ii, tr. with intro. and notes by William Charlton (Oxford, 1970); bks. iii and iv, tr. with intro. and notes by Edward Hussey (Oxford, 1983). George Berkeley, De Motu, in The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (London, 1948–57). motives and motivation. Explanations of behaviour may be in terms of reasons—someone waves because he wants to attract our attention and thinks he may do so thereby— or in terms of causes—a person shivers as a result of the cold. But may not reasons themselves be causes? There are indeed contexts in which ‘cause’ and ‘reason’ may interchange, as in the phrases ‘give cause’ and ‘give rea- son’, and we may use ‘because’ with reference to either. However, there is a use of ‘cause’ in which experimenta- tion is in principle required to verify that C caused E, as with cold and shivering, whereas it requires no more than the agent’s honest word for his reason for acting for this to be so. Motives have their place among the latter. Or so it would seem in the simpler cases. But ‘motive’ is often invoked precisely when there is a departure from normal reasons. A person goes into a shop to buy a news- paper. That, he says, is his reason. We wonder about his motive if we suspect that there is more than meets the eye, something beyond the declared reason for acting thus. Might he not be unaware of his true motive? We may wish to speak of an unconscious motive in such a case, but it is questionable whether we should sever all connection with the agent’s awareness. The explanation why the agent acted can still count as a motive explanation provided we leave open the possibility that he should come round to acknowledging that he did indeed act for the reason suggested. Rule out any such possibility and, while we may be able to speak in terms of a cause of the behaviour, we rule out any justification for speaking in terms of desire, intention, trying, and the like. But, despite his sincere protestations to the contrary, might it not be true that a person is acting out of such motives as greed, vanity, or ambition? That could be so, but in a way that does not undermine the agent’s honestly avowed reason. Rather, in the circumstances, we may say, acting as he did motives and motivation 633 counts as acting out of vanity; or, whatever the protester may say, ‘greedy’ is just the word for that sort of behav- iour. So long as this is the point of dispute, it is not one on which the agent’s authority is final. But nor is it a question of identifying a cause. While motive explanations are not causal, an appeal to causes may explain why such-and-such counts as a reason for the agent; why, for instance, reasons for acting which would show a person to be vain carry so much weight with that person. Relatedly, the cause–reason division provides a way of finding room for considerations of self- interest while allowing the possibility of disinterested motives. Why did A come to B’s assistance? His sincerely avowed reason: He thought he must, that it was the proper thing to do. No suggestion that there was anything in it for A; indeed, the thought that he might in some way benefit from his act, or at least avoid the guilt which would come with inaction, did not even enter his head. On the other hand, there is also the question why A is disposed to respond altruistically to those in need, and the answer to this may well lie not with A’s reasons for acting, but with his upbringing. Perhaps it has taken rewards and punish- ments to bring him to a state where such other-regarding considerations weigh with him. Similarly, abuse suffered by a person as a child may explain how he comes to have the motives he has, but as a cause, not as something which figures among his reasons. b.b.r. *choosing and deciding; egoism and altruism; mental causation; reasons and causes; volition. A. Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will (London, 1963). A. I. Melden, Free Action (London, 1961). G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, 1948). Mo Tzu (579–438bc?). Born in the year of Confucius’ death, Mo Tzu was his major philosophical rival. He criticized Confucians for what he perceived to be their élitism, partiality, nepotism, fatalism, extravagance, and wasteful- ness. He founded an extraordinary guild of religious, pacifist, itinerant, artisan soldiers, who practised their idealistic philosophy of impartial concern jianai (‘universal love’) by defending weak states against aggressors. Accord- ing to Mo Tzu, social values (yi) must be imposed with laws and punishments, to prevent reversion to state of indi- vidualist antagonism. Mo Tzu proclaimed three standards for the evaluation of social doctrines: success of historical precedent, observations of the people, projected utility. The later Mohists developed theories of optics, and a logical system of dichotomous distinctions, both linguistic and evaluative: shi affirmation, fei denial/rejection. s.c. Later Mohist Logic, Ethics, and Science, ed. A. C. Graham (London, 1978). Mo Tzu: Basic Writings, tr. Burton Watson (New York, 1963). moving rows paradox: see stadium paradox. multiculturalism. Most countries today are ‘multi- cultural’ in the sense that they contain many distinct ethno-cultural groups, as a result of the historic incorpor- ation of minority groups or the admission of new immi- grants. Multiculturalism, understood as a normative claim or political *ideology, argues that this ethno-cultural diversity should be accommodated, not suppressed, and celebrated, not feared. In this sense, multiculturalism stands opposed to traditional models of nation building and *nationalism that sought to create homogeneous national societies within each state. Multiculturalism is a widespread movement in both Western political theory and Western political practice, but its defenders face two key challenges. First, what are the limits to the legitimate accommodation of diversity? In particular, should traditional cultural practices that violate liberal- democratic norms be tolerated? Second, what holds multicultural societies together? In particular, can the celebration of multicultural differences be reconciled with the promotion of common national identities and loyal- ties? These issues remain a matter of lively ongoing debate. w.k. W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford, 1995). mundus imaginalis (‘a¯lam al-khayal). The term was used first by Sohravardı¯ to define a ‘boundary’ realm that con- nects the sensory and the abstract intellectual segments of the whole continuum of being, and is the distinguishing component of non-Aristotelian *cosmology in *Islamic philosophy. It is constructed as the locus of visions, prophecy, and sorcery, and also defines *eschatology. This wonderland is described by negating Aristotelian logical principles and laws of physics, and is employed to explain non-standard experiences such as ‘true dreams’ and ‘miraculous powers’. As the individual subject moves away from the centre of the sensory segment of the con- tinuum nearing the boundary realm, qualitative change takes place. Material bodies change to imaginalis ones; time changes, no longer confined to measure of linear space; and space is no longer limited by the Euclidean. h.z. *possible worlds. Fazlur Rahman, ‘Dream, Imagination and ‘A ¯ lam al-Mitha¯l’, Islamic Studies (1964). Murdoch, Iris (1919–99). Iris Murdoch DBE, better known as a novelist than as a philosopher, taught philoso- phy in Oxford for fifteen years. In 1954 she wrote the first book in English on Jean-Paul Sartre, relating his early phil- osophy to his plays and novels. The crossing of bound- aries between literature and philosophy marks all her work. Her main philosophical interest is in ethics, and she held that goodness has a real, though abstract, existence in the world. This thesis was expounded at length in Meta- physics as a Guide to Morals (1993). She could be called a modern Platonist, and wrote perceptively on Plato (e.g. The Fire and the Sun (1977)). She also wrote about educa- tion and religion. The actual existence of goodness is, in 634 motives and motivation her view, the way it is now possible to understand the idea of God. m.warn. *Platonism; novel, the philosophical. music. Although we can find philosophical writing on music as early as Plato and Aristotle, and discussion of it by philosophers outside the analytic tradition such as Schopenhauer, Adorno, and Nietzsche, the philosophical problems which we now identify as comprising the aes- thetics of music received their first classic treatment by the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick. Although his treatment is not always lucid, and debate continues as to what Hanslick meant, it seems fairly clear that his prime target was a Romantic conception of music which subsequently became known as the expressionist theory of art, that beauty in music depends upon the accurate representa- tion or expression of the feelings of the composer. (Expres- sionist theories characteristically maintain that a psychological state of the artist is communicated via the work to the listener.) Of most philosophical significance in his objections are the claim that there is a cognitive elem- ent in the feelings of hope, anger, etc. A judgement is involved that may be a necessary component in individu- ating the particular feeling. Such an element of judgement is absent in music. The English writer Edmund Gurney, in a large and rambling book, The Power of Sound, developed, apparently independently, a parallel line of criticism. Both emphasize the looseness of fit between music and the expressive descriptions we make of it. Both are, not unfairly, viewed as formalists who believe that the worth of music lies in the beauty of its patterns rather than in its expressive power. The aesthetics of music has flowered since the 1980s. The debate as to how music can be properly described as ‘sad’ or ‘exuberant’ has continued apace. The most widely held view is probably the view that it is the music itself which is sad, and not the composer, listener, or performer, and that we describe the music in this way because of the way the music moves, because of its pace or the angularity or otherwise of its lines. However, this orthodoxy has been challenged by a number of writers, who have argued that sad music does have a tendency to make the listener sad, a position which has become known as ‘arousalism’. There has been much recent philosophical discussion of what it is for something to be a work of music. The debate has largely been between Platonists, such as Peter Kivy, and others. Platonists have tended to argue that the work of music is an abstract sound pattern which is dis- covered, rather than created, by its composer. It is fair to say that the centre of controversy here is how we should understand the creativity of the composer: Does he create ex nihilo, or is he more in the position of the great and innovative scientist whose genius enables him to see what others have missed? A more moderate Platonism, such as that of Jerrold Levinson, allows that the work of music is a pattern or a type of which performances or interpretations are tokens, but that it is a type which is created by a composer. Recently, there has been a greater realization of the extent to which the concept of a work of music is itself a historical phenomenon which developed as the concert- hall became the sonic equivalent of the art gallery or museum, a place where works can be displayed through performance. Through this, a deep distinction between work and performance became the norm, with the notion of fidelity to the work coming progressively to the fore. Consequent on this, philosophers have become increasingly interested in a concept which has been cen- tral to musical performance over the last half-century, the notion of ‘authentic performance’ or, as it is now some- times called, the ‘historically informed performance’. The debate is very involved. Should we attempt to re-create the sound the composer would have heard or the effect his music had on the first audiences? Do we have a moral duty to the composer to present his work as he wished? Should we give precedence to the tradition of playing the work, incorporating the insights of generations of interpreters? There is also a growing interest in the ontology of music outside the Western classical tradition, such as jazz, rock, and world music. All in all the aesthetics of music is currently the liveliest branch of the philosophy of the arts. r.a.s. Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca, NY, 1994). —— Musical Works and Performances (Oxford, 2001). Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford, 1992). Peter Kivy, Authenticities (Ithaca, NY, 1995). —— The Fine Art of Repetition (Cambridge, 1993). —— Sound Sentiment (Philadelphia, 1989). Jerrold Levinson, Music, Art and Metaphysics (Ithaca, NY, 1990). R. A. Sharpe, Music and Humanism (Oxford, 2000). my station and its duties: see Bradley. mysticism. The concept of mysticism is closely related to that of religious experience, but probably they should not be thought to be identical. It seems useful to distinguish mystical experience from numinous experience of the sort described by Rudolf Otto, and from the more ‘ordinary’ sort of experience of the presence and activity of *God, which is well illustrated by John Baillie. William James characterized mystical experience by four marks: tran- siency, passivity, noetic quality, and ineffability. Perhaps we should add a fifth, that mystical experiences often, per- haps characteristically, involve what is now called an ‘altered state of consciousness’—trance, visions, suppres- sion of cognitive contact with the ordinary world, loss of the usual distinction between subject and object, weak- ening or loss of the sense of the self, etc. These features constitute an interesting ‘syndrome’. Not all *religious experience is mystical and not every mystical experience includes all of the features of this syndrome, but there is a large body of individual testimonies and descriptions derived from all the major religious traditions (and per- haps from minor traditions also) which involve many of these features. mysticism 635 636 mysticism Much of this mystical experience is taken to be reli- giously significant by the subject, but there is an inter- esting and difficult question about whether all mysticism is inherently religious, with some (e.g. William Stace) sug- gesting that it need not be. Some mystical experience is overtly theistic, having an ostensible reference to God, roughly as he is conceived in the theistic religions. And it is dualistic, in the sense of retaining the distinction between the mystic and the God who is ostensibly experienced. St Teresa of Avila, a Spanish Catholic of the sixteenth cen- tury, is a good example of such a mystic. Other mystics, however, even within the Catholic tradition, tend towards monism, emphasizing the unity of all things and the lack of real distinctions, even between the mystic and the divine reality. Mysticism of the theistic, dualistic sort seems to generate no particular difficulty for Christian metaphysics, and indeed often includes specifically Chris- tian elements, such as visions of Christ. Strongly monistic mysticism, however, is harder to square with a Christian view, and when such mystics have themselves been Chris- tians they have often been suspected of heresy. This sort of mysticism is likely to find a more comfortable religious home in the great non-theistic religions. There are two principal ways of trying to derive some religious significance from mysticism. The first way is indirect and inferential, and it is accessible to non-mystics. It takes the prevalence of reported mystical experience as a premiss, and derives some conclusion from it in con- junction with some auxiliary principles. Often an analogy is drawn with sense-experience. C. D. Broad, for example, holds that a widely shared sort of experience, tending towards a similar interpretation, is plausibly taken to be the result of contact with some corresponding objective reality (unless we have some special reason to think other- wise). This, he says, is the way we treat sense-experience, and mystical experience should be treated likewise. The other way is especially attractive for the subjects of mystical experiences which have a strong noetic element. For in those experiences the subject is strongly convinced that he or she is acquiring a piece of knowledge, a sort of revelation, in the course of the experience itself. Such sub- jects may well take that element of their experience at face value. Indeed, they may find that the convictions which are thus generated are among the very strongest in their entire intellectual life (for example, St Teresa). This way of assessing the significance of mysticism is, however, not readily accessible to non-mystics. Normally these power- ful convictions are generated by the experience itself, in those who have had that experience, and not in others who have only the reports of such experiences. In James’s terminology, mystical experience is ‘authoritative’ for those who have it, but not for others. g.i.m. *holy, numinous, and sacred. John Baillie, Our Knowledge of God (New York, 1959). William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 1985). George I. Mavrodes, Belief in God (New York, 1981). Rodolf Otto, The Idea of The Holy, tr. John W. Harvey (New York, 1970). St Teresa of Avila, The Life of the Holy Mother Teresa of Jesus (Lon- don, 1979). Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (first pub. 1911; New York, 1961). myth of the given. Expression introduced by *Wilfred Sellars to suggest there is no uninterpreted content of experience that is foundational in epistemology: e.g. Locke’s ideas, Hume’s impressions, the sense-data of the Logical Positivists. The myth of the given implies that facts can in principle be known non-inferentially. No non- inferentially known fact presupposes knowledge of any other fact or general truth. Such non-inferentially known facts are ultimately authoritative. The attack on the given is arguably anticipated by Vico and Kant. s.p. Wilfred Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (London, 1963), ch. 5, sects. 3–11. Na¯ga¯rjuna ( fl. 150 ad). Greatest sceptic-mystic dialect- ician of the Voidist school of Maha¯ya¯na Buddhism. Na¯ga¯rjuna interpreted Buddha’s ‘middle way’ as empti- ness of all things. This emptiness, best shown through silence, is realized when assent is withheld from all four logically possible answers to a metaphysical question (yes, no, both, neither). For example: ‘Entities do not originate from themselves, from a wholly other entity, or from both, and nor do they originate without a cause’. This rele- gates Buddha’s own teachings about dependent origin- ation, suffering, selflessness, and *nirvana to the level of relative rather than absolute truth. These levels of truth are distinguished to meet the charge of self-refutation which Na¯ga¯rjuna anticipates: ‘Isn’t the Voidist yelling “Don’t yell”?’ Somewhat like the sentences of Wittgen- stein’s Tractatus, the Voidist’s own utterances count as therapeutically useful nonsense. a.c. *Buddhist philosophy. M. Sprung, Lucid Exposition of the Middle Way (London, 1979). Nagel, Ernest (1901–85). A leading figure in the logical empiricist movement, Nagel was perhaps somewhat unfortunate in that he published his definitive work, The Structure of Science, just one year before Thomas Kuhn published his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This latter effectively spelt the end for the ahistorical, prescrip- tive approach to the philosophy of science that Nagel epit- omized. Nevertheless, by virtue of his clear, comprehen- sive, and unemotional approach to the problems of sci- ence, Nagel did continue to have much influence, particu- larly in his standard account of ‘reduction’, the process where one science or theory is absorbed into another. Seeing this relationship as essentially one of deductive consequence, the older of the newer, and everything of physics, Nagel came to consider in some detail the prima facie distinctive nature of the biological sciences, espe- cially inasmuch as they use ‘teleological’ or ‘functional’ language. Unexpectedly, inasmuch as he thought this lan- guage significant, he thought it eliminable, and inasmuch as it is uneliminable, it is insignificant. Forty subsequent years of discussion of this subject suggests that this was a mistaken judgement. m.r. *logical empiricism; reductionism; teleological explan- ation. E. Nagel, The Structure of Science (New York, 1961). M. Ruse, The Philosophy of Biology Today (Albany, NY, 1988). Nagel, Thomas (1937– ). American philosopher, Professor at New York University. Nagel’s philosophical work has been dominated by concern over how to reconcile the per- sonal, subjective, first-person view we have of events, the world, of what is valuable and important, and the imper- sonal, objective, impartial view we have of these things, a view which is ordinarily thought of as more likely to be true just because impartial, untainted by local or personal con- cerns and horizons. His first book, The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford, 1970), considered issues of this character in con- nection with reasons for action of a personal or impersonal kind, but he has pursued related themes into questions in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, free will, and gen- eral metaphysics. Possibly his most influential piece is his journal paper ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, published in 1974, where he contends that all materialist and functional- ist theories of mind and consciousness omit the central fact of *mentality—that there is something it feels like to be in a certain material or functional state. In this case, we see a tension between the lived experience intimate to the indi- vidual subject and the generalizing theoretical accounts which seem to provide the best overall explanations. This paper is in his collection Mortal Questions (Cambridge, 1979). He has explored this cluster of issues most fully in The View from Nowhere (Oxford, 1986). Nagel’s writing is characterized by a lightness which makes it accessible to a very wide range of readers. He has written a brief and witty introduction to philosophy, What Does It All Mean? (Oxford, 1987). n.j.h.d. *dualism; inequality; functionalism. naïve realism. A theory of *perception that holds that our ordinary perception of physical objects is direct, unmedi- ated by awareness of subjective entities, and that, in nor- mal perceptual conditions, these objects have the properties they appear to have. If a pickle tastes sour, the sun looks orange, and the water feels hot, then, if condi- tions are normal, the pickle is sour, the sun orange, and the N water hot. Tastes, sounds, and colours are not in the heads of perceivers; they are qualities of the external objects that are perceived. Seeing an object is not (as *representative theorists maintain) seeing it, so to speak, on mental televi- sion where the properties of a subjective *sense-datum or *percept (e.g. colour) represent or ‘stand in for’ the object- ive, scientific properties of the external object (wave- length of reflected light). Although this theory bears the name ‘naïve’, and is often said to be the view of the person on the street, it need not deny or conflict with scientific accounts of perception. It need only deny that one’s per- ceptual awareness of objective properties involves an awareness of the properties of subjective (mental) inter- mediaries. f.d. H. H. Price, Perception (London, 1932). names. In the broadest sense of the term ‘name’, names divide into two classes—proper names and common names, these being species of singular and general terms respectively. Proper names are names of individuals, such as ‘London’, ‘Mars’, and ‘Napoleon’, whereas common names are names of kinds of individuals, such as ‘city’, ‘planet’, and ‘man’. Not all singular terms are proper names; for instance, pronouns like ‘I’ and ‘he’ are not, nor are demonstrative noun phrases like ‘this city’ and ‘that man’. Definite descriptions, such as ‘the capital city of England’, are also commonly contrasted with proper names (though Frege treated them as belonging to the same semantic category). Similarly, not all general terms are common names; for instance, adjectival or character- izing general terms like ‘red’ are not, nor are abstract nouns like ‘redness’ and ‘bravery’ (if indeed the latter are deemed to be general terms). Recently, philosophical debate has focused on proper names much more than on common names (apart from the special case of natural-kind terms). A prominent issue has been whether such names have both sense and refer- ence, as Frege believed, or whether they are purely refer- ential devices, as J. S. Mill held and as Kripke now contends. (An implication of the latter position is that proper names do not have linguistic meanings specifiable by way of *definition.) Frege’s claim draws sustenance from the fact that an identity statement involving two dif- ferent proper names—for instance, ‘George Orwell is Eric Blair’—can be informative, which seems to imply that it expresses a different proposition from that expressed when one of those names is merely repeated, as in ‘George Orwell is George Orwell’. On the other hand, Kripke plaus- ibly argues that speakers can use proper names to refer to individuals about whom they possess no uniquely identi- fying information, as when a speaker affirms that Kurt Gödel proved the *incompleteness theorem even though she cannot clearly differentiate in thought between Gödel and many other eminent logicians. (A Fregean *‘sense’ is supposed to provide just such identifying information about, or a ‘mode of presentation’ of, its reference.) For Kripke, proper names are *rigid designators— in which respect they differ from (most) definite descriptions—and their reference is secured not by some ‘sense’ which a speaker attaches to them, but rather by an external causal chain linking the speaker’s use of a name to an original ‘baptism’ in which the name was first assigned to a certain individual. As the name is passed on from speaker to speaker, all that is required for a later recipient of the name to use it successfully to refer to the individual originally named by it is that each speaker in the chain should use it with the intention to refer to the same indi- vidual as it was used to refer to by the speaker from whom he received the name. However, this so-called causal the- ory of reference is not without its difficulties; for instance, Gareth Evans has argued that it cannot accommodate some of the ways in which names change their reference over time. The Kripkean account of proper names (and natural- kind terms) as rigid designators is linked to certain meta- physical doctrines of an essentialist character—such as the theses of the necessity of identity and of origin—because of the ways in which such names are thought to behave in modal contexts. For instance, it is held that, given that George Orwell is Eric Blair, George Orwell could not have been different from Eric Blair—though this impossibility is a posteriori rather than a priori. Similarly, given that George Orwell was in fact born of certain parents, it is held to be an a posteriori *metaphysical necessity that he was born of just those parents. e.j.l. S. A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford, 1980). A. W. Moore (ed.), Meaning and Reference (Oxford, 1993). N. Salmon, Reference and Essence (Princeton, NJ, 1982). names, fictional: see fictional names. names, logically proper: see logically proper names. narrative. A narrative in its widest sense is a representa- tion of a sequence of events between which there is some connection. In this wide sense, a film, for example, can count as a narrative, even in the absence of an explicit nar- rator. Not every representation counts as a narrative, however. A minimal criterion is that the represented events exhibit some temporal order. The sentence ‘Lucy is wearing pink today’ thus fails on this criterion to be a nar- rative. But mere temporal structure is not sufficient. Con- sider the following: ‘833: Two comets appeared. 834: In this year Bishop Wulfstan passed away. 835: There were great floods.’ This is simply a chronicle of events. In a true narrative, the represented events should exhibit some causal connectedness, making each event more intelli- gible than it would be if reported in isolation, or as part of a mere chronicle. Within this broad category we can go on to distinguish historical from fictional narrative. The concept of narrative has of course great interest and importance for literary theorists, but it has also been of interest to philosophers. It has, for example, been used by Alasdair MacIntyre to express the way in which a human life is a structured, unified whole, and not simply a series of discrete events. Human actions are made 638 naïve realism intelligible though being part of a narrative. (This is in marked contrast to the view expressed in Sartre’s Nausea, that any narrative misrepresents human life, which in real- ity is unstructured and has no denouement.) Philosophies of action that attempt to isolate what are sometimes called ‘basic actions’ that are considered simply as behaviour that is the outcome of an intention, and then analyse agency in terms of such actions, thus run the risk of providing an unduly artificial and idealized picture of what intentional action consists in. The point can be put in ethical terms: in so far as we construct our ethical theory from consider- ation of actions, choices, and situations that are abstracted from any wider narrative that would give them meaning, that theory will be correspondingly impoverished. The link between narrative and our understanding of *time has been explored within the continental tradition by Paul Ricœur. r.le p. *action; basic action; fiction; history, problems of the philosophy of. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd edn. (London, 1985). Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, tr. K. Blamey, K. McLaughlin, and D. Pellauer, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1984–8). Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, tr. R. Baldick (Harmondsworth, 1965). nasty, brutish, and short. ‘. . . and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Leviathan, i. xiii. 9). This is one of Hobbes’s most memorable phrases and comes at the end of his description of what life is like in the *state of nature when ‘men live without a common power to keep them all in awe’. This powerful description, like everything Hobbes writes on moral and political mat- ters, has as its goal the attempt to persuade people to obey the law and thereby to avoid civil war. For civil war leads to the state of nature with all of the horrors mentioned in the above quote. b.g. national and regional philosophies: see African; Ameri- can; Australian; Canadian; Chinese; continental; Croat- ian; Czech; Danish; English; Finnish; French; German; Greek philosophy, modern; Indian; Irish; Islamic; Italian; Japanese; Korean; Latin American; Netherlands; New Zealand; Norwegian; Polish; Russian; Scottish; Serbian; Slovene; Spanish; Swedish. national character. From the time of Vico, it has been widely held that *human nature develops through history, with pervasive patterns of thought and behaviour in any one group of people distinguishing it from others. What, then, gives the language, culture, and collective experience of a group its particular identity? For Herder, to whom the very term *‘nationalism’ is attributed, it was the soul of the nation to which the group belonged. He argued, against liberal universalism, that an individual could develop spir- itually only within a national community, though, unlike Fichte, he did not think any one nation favoured over the rest. Recognizing the cultural significance of national char- acter and history need not be militaristic or supremacist or based on race. But, if not tempered by a substratum of timeless and universal values, it can, as demonstrated in Herder himself, lead to the relativistic conclusion that the values of different nations are incommensurable, and criti- cizable only from within. a.o’h. *conservatism; people, the. Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder (London, 1976). nationalism. A doctrine which holds that national iden- tity ought to be accorded political recognition, that nations have rights (to autonomy, *self-determination, and/or sovereignty), and that the members of the nation ought to band together in defence of those rights. Nation- alism can be distinguished from, though it is often in prac- tice indistinct from, chauvinism, which makes one’s own national identity the overriding moral–political consider- ation. The theoretical distinction here runs parallel to the distinction between individualism and egoism, and it can be elucidated in the following way: national rights (like individual *rights) are properly reiterated for each newly arriving nation (individual). Hence, the limits of these rights are necessarily fixed by the rights of the nation that comes next. Chauvinism, by contrast, acknowledges no limits except those dictated by national interest. It is entirely possible, then, to be a liberal nationalist, defend- ing the rights of nations other than one’s own and seeking negotiated settlements, compromises, even in disputes involving one’s own. But this position is relatively rare in political life or, better, it is a position that seems to erode rapidly whenever the disputed issues touch upon (what are taken to be) vital national interests. As an *ideology of identity, attaching political signifi- cance to the history and culture of an ethnos or *people, nationalism is a modern phenomenon, though it is not without precedents and parallels in the ancient world. Similarly, nations, conceived as groups whose members are prospective nationalists, are modern creations, polit- ically fashioned out of diverse social materials. Citizenship, religious faith, common language, some defining histor- ical experience: all these in some cases, any one of them in others, have played a formative part (or, in another ver- sion of the story, have been exploited by publicists and politicians) in shaping national identity. The resulting nationalisms differ among themselves—more political and open, more ethnic and exclusive—depending on the achieved shape. But it does not appear that national rights are dependent in a similar way. They must be (like indi- vidual rights again) the same for all nations that are pre- pared to recognize their limits. m.walz. *national character; international relations, philosophy of; homeland, right to a. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983). Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York, 1946). R. McKim and J. McMahan (eds.), The Morality of Nationalism (New York, 1997). K. R. Minogue, Nationalism (New York, 1968). nationalism 639 . motion: Achilles and the tortoise, the dichotomy, the flying arrow, and the stadium. s.p. Aristotle, Physics, bks. i and ii, tr. with intro. and notes by William Charlton (Oxford, 1970); bks. iii. later recipient of the name to use it successfully to refer to the individual originally named by it is that each speaker in the chain should use it with the intention to refer to the same indi- vidual. has as its goal the attempt to persuade people to obey the law and thereby to avoid civil war. For civil war leads to the state of nature with all of the horrors mentioned in the above quote.