The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 69 doc

well as the world of religion. Central to Nishida’s thinking are the ideas of the ‘topos of nothingness’ and of the world as the ‘self-identity of absolute contradictories’. g.r.p. *nothingness, absolute. Nishitani Keiji, Nishida Kitaro¯, tr. Yamamoto Seisaku and James Heisig (Berkeley, Calif., 1991). Nishitani Keiji (1900–90). Deeply influenced by such Western figures as Meister Eckhart, Dostoevsky, Niet- zsche, and Heidegger, and yet firmly rooted in the Chinese and Japanese *Zen traditions, Nishitani was the major figure of the ‘second generation’ Kyoto School and a consummately existential religious philosopher. More prepared than his mentor Nishida to engage the Western philosophical tradition on its own terms, Nishitani was a pioneer in the field of East–West philosophical dialogue. Concerned throughout his career with the problem of nihilism, he developed an existential philosophy in which, if the self is plumbed to sufficient depth, the nihilum or void at its base may be realized as the absolute *nothing- ness (mu) or fertile emptiness (ku¯) of Maha¯ya¯na Buddhist philosophy. The philosophical synthesis effected in his masterwork, Religion and Nothingness (1962), matches the achievements of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger in depth of insight. g.r.p. The Religious Philosophy of Nishitani Keiji ed. Taitetsu Unno (Berkeley, Calif., 1989). Nkrumah, Kwame (1909–72). African statesman and philosopher, who was educated in the United States and Great Britain, Kwame Nkrumah spearheaded the move- ment that led Ghana to independence from colonialism in 1957, and became Prime Minister and subsequently Presi- dent of Ghana. He expounded a comprehensive, physical- ist theory of nature and society, which he applied to his vision of a political economy for the whole of Africa in a Pan-African Union. w.e.a. *philosopher-king. Basil Davidson, A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah (London, 1973). noble lie. A myth proposed in Plato’s Republic according to which when human beings were formed in the earth, those who should rule had gold mixed with them, the sol- diers silver, and farmers and craftsmen iron. The aim of the myth is to keep individuals happy with their desig- nated roles, but would anyone believe it, even after gener- ations of indoctrination? The speakers in the dialogue are doubtful, while insisting firmly, scandalously, and possi- bly defensibly that rulers may legitimately lie for reasons of state. a.o’h. *ideology; teaching and indoctrinating. Plato, The Republic, 414–15, 459–60. nocturnal council: see Plato. no false lemmas principle: see lemma. nomic. A term meaning scientifically lawlike, thus distin- guishing a claim both from the merely contingent (as ‘John is very happy’) and the moral or legal (as ‘You ought to keep promises’). Nomic statements, like ‘All bodies attract each other with a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them’, are generally thought both universal and necessary. The analysis of the exact nature of the latter, especially as it has been thought to be causal, has provided a good living for a good many philosophers for a good many years. m.r. *causation; necessity, nomic. E. Nagel, The Structure of Science (New York, 1961). nominalism. Nominalism, traditionally understood, is a doctrine which denies the real existence of *universals, conceived as the supposed referents of general terms like ‘red’ and ‘table’. In order to explain how and why we clas- sify different individual things alike as being red or as being tables, nominalists appeal to particular resem- blances between those things. Realists object that such an account involves tacit reliance on universals because resemblance is always similarity in some general respect, pointing out that different things resemble each other in many different ways. But nominalists reply that such objections are misconceived and question-begging. In more recent usage, ‘nominalism’ is often employed as a label for any repudiation of *abstract entities, whether universals or particulars, and thus embraces the rejection of such things as propositions, sets, and numbers. e.j.l. *realism. D. M. Armstrong, Nominalism and Realism (Cambridge, 1978). nomological: see nomic. nomological danglers: see identity theory of mind. non-being and nothing. Negative events, which seem to be needed as the worldly correspondents of true *negative propositions, are troublesome because we lack criteria of identity for them, there being no non-arbitrary answer to ‘How many forest fires did not occur yesterday?’ To avoid commitment to them attempts have been made to analyse negative into positive propositions. That Theaete- tus does not fly is analysed either as that every property of Theaetetus is other than being in flight or that there is some positive property of Theaetetus that is incompatible with being in flight, such as being planted on the ground. It is objected that these analyses are viciously circular, since otherness and incompatibility are themselves nega- tive relations. To settle this dispute an adequate criterion for distinguishing between negative and positive proper- ties must be formulated, the most promising of which is based on a difference in their degree of specificity or entail- ment relations. Positive properties, unlike negative ones, entail properties of both the same and different qualities than themselves; for example, non-red entails only non- crimson and other properties of the same quality, while 660 Nishida Kitaro¯ red entails both coloured and non-green, the former being of the same and the latter of a different quality than itself. In contrast with absences within the world, Nothing is the absence of the world itself—a total absence of every positive contingent reality. Bergson utilized the above incompatibility analysis to show that the concept of Nothing is contradictory, since every absence requires an existent positive reality that logically excludes it. The application of this analysis to ‘No contingent beings exist’ results in ‘Every existent being has some positive property that is incompatible with being existent’, but it is unclear what this positive property of existent being could be. r.m.g. R. M. Gale, Negation and Non-Being (Oxford, 1976). A. N. Prior, ‘Negation’, in P. Edwards (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York, 1967). non-cognitivism. The name of a position in ethics. Like many such names it is used more by its opponents than by its supporters. This one is used to designate that family of ethical positions in which it is supposed that moral judge- ments do not possess truth-value and hence can not be known. An example of a non-cognitivist position is *emo- tivism; that is, the claim that moral judgements are merely expressions of emotion. r.h. *moral realism; quasi-realism; prescriptivism. non-contradiction, law of. The conjunction of a propos- ition and its negation is a *contradiction and is necessarily false. In *traditional logic the principle was sometimes taken to be a law of thought, along with the principles of *identity and *excluded middle. In the *propositional cal- culus the principle is reflected in the theorem ~ (P · ~P), which is a *tautology. A theory in which this law fails, where a proposition P and its contradictory not-P are deducible, is an inconsist- ent theory. r.b.m. B. Mates, Elementary Logic (Oxford, 1972). W. Kneale and M. Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford, 1962). G. Priest et al. (eds.), The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Essays (Oxford, 2004). non-Euclidean geometry. Any geometry some of whose axioms and theorems contradict Euclid’s. Euclid’s axiom- atization was often thought to provide the paradigm of *knowledge, by making deductive steps from necessary and self-evident truths. But as the parallel axiom, in particu- lar, seemed less obvious than the others, many attempts were made to derive it from them. If it were derivable, then by adding its negation to the others a contradiction would be deducible from the new axiom set. Over several centuries many propositions were deduced from the new set which appeared self-contradictory, so the work then petered out; but no plain contradiction of the form ‘P and not-P’ was produced. In the nineteenth century Bolyai, Lobachevsky, and Riemann deduced more theorems, and proposed these systems as independ- ent ‘non-Euclidean’ geometries. It has since been shown that if Euclid’s geometry is consistent then so are the others, so presumably all are. Most physicists now believe that *space is non-Euclidean. At least it is not necessarily Euclidean, as many philosophers had argued or assumed. a.j.l. *space-time. Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture (London, 1954), ch. 26. non-natural properties. To ethical naturalists, moral terms refer to ‘natural’ properties, properties most often confirmable by sensory experience. Other philosophers have argued that the distinctiveness of moral properties is lost in such an analysis (*naturalistic fallacy), and have claimed that moral terms refer to ‘non-natural’ properties, detectable by ‘intuition’ alone. This was how G. E. Moore understood *‘good’. Others again have challenged the credentials of intuition as a mode of knowledge and ques- tioned how appeal to such properties could, intelligibly, guide the action of moral agents. r.w.h. *ethical naturalism. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge, 1903). nonsense. A favoured term of condemnation in philoso- phy, ‘nonsense’ tends to enjoy here a different range of application from that found in everyday usage. In the lat- ter, statements are often pronounced nonsense on the grounds that they are outrageously improbable or patently false, whereas nonsense is commonly taken by philosophers to be such a fundamental defect as to exclude even falsity. The everyday usage may be hard to avoid. Suppose that a proposition, P, is declared to be nonsense because unverifiable. If, by reflecting on P, we come to see that it must indeed elude all attempts at verification, this realization is one which would in all likelihood depend on our grasp of the meaning of P, in which case falsity rather than unintelligibility would appear the most that could coherently be claimed. b.b.r. *verification principle. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London, 1946). nonsense upon stilts. How Bentham described the claim of the French Revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen that there were ‘natural and impre- scriptible’ rights. The claim that there were *natural rights was, to him, ‘simple nonsense’; it was the claim that these rights were imprescriptible (that is, unrevisable) which made it into ‘nonsense upon stilts’. r.h. Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies (Edinburgh, 1843), article ii. no-ownership theory. The theory that experiences do not require a real *subject to whom they must belong. Mental occurrences are treated as independent events, and our normal language for describing them, with its no-ownership theory 661 apparent reference, using personal pronouns, to subjects who have them, is viewed either as not designating any- thing, as with the first person, or as designating the body to which the experiences are causally linked, in the third person. The theory was attributed by P. F. Strawson to middle-period Wittgenstein and to Schlick. Its point is to avoid non-physical selves, but independent, unowned, experiences are counter-intuitive, and, although Straw- son’s charge of incoherence may be unfounded, there are less extreme alternatives to *cartesianism. p.f.s. *mind–body problem; mind, problems of the philoso- phy of; persons; other minds. P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London, 1959), ch. 3. normalization. Dag Prawitz proved (1965) an analogue for *natural deduction systems of Gentzen’s cut-elimination theorem: every derivation could be transformed into a normalized one. The concept of a normalized proof is more complicated to explain than that of a cut-free proof in the sequent calculus, but the essential idea is the same, the basic step being that of removing any part of the for- mal *proof in which a formula is first derived by means of an introduction rule and thereupon eliminated as the major premiss of an elimination rule: an unnecessary detour. Suppose, for instance, that A & B is inferred from separate premisses A andB, and that A is then immediately inferred from it. Plainly, the detour through A & B was redundant; the two lines on which stood, first, A & B and then A can be excised, together with the entire part of the derivation leading to the premiss B. This is the basic step in a normalization. If the application of the elimination rule was delayed, the derivation must first be rearranged to make it follow immediately upon the application of the introduction rule. Building on a remark of Gentzen’s that a logical *con- stant is defined by the introduction rules, of which the elim- ination rules are consequences, Prawitz has explored means of justifying elimination rules by appeal to the introduction rules. The strategy is to show that canonical proofs of the premisses of an elimination rule can be trans- formed into a canonical proof of its conclusion, a canon- ical proof being one whose last line is inferred by means of an introduction rule: this is a justification only under the assumption that, if a logically complex statement is known to be true, its truth could be known by a canonical proof of it. The condition that an elimination rule can be so justified is precisely that the basic step of normalization can be carried out. m.d. D. Prawitz, Natural Deduction (Stockholm, 1965). —— ‘Towards a Foundation of a General Proof Theory’, in P. Suppes et al. (eds.), Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, iv (Amsterdam, 1973). —— ‘On the Idea of a General Proof Theory’, Synthese (1974). normative. ‘Normative’ is the adjective derived from the noun ‘norm’, which signifies either the average or usual level of attainment or performance for an individual or group; or, and more usually in philosophical discussion, a standard, rule, principle used to judge or direct human con- duct as something to be complied with. The phrase ‘moral norm’ is used generically to mean anything which proffers moral guidance, instruction, or a basis for appraisive judge- ment. It is a term of fairly recent coinage, but having the same root as the more familiar ‘normal’ in the Latin word norma, a carpenter’s rule or square. ‘Normal’ and ‘norma- tive’ are importantly distinct, however, since it is not plainly the case that what is normal represents a standard to be complied with. The same issues arise over what is *‘nat- ural’ or ‘unnatural’ being used as a standard. n.j.h.d. See G. H. von Wright, Norm and Action (London, 1963) for a treat- ment of issues in this area. norms, epistemic. Epistemic norms are the rules or stand- ards by which we epistemically evaluate beliefs. For example, we often criticize beliefs that are formed in ways that are not appropriately sensitive to the available evi- dence, and this has led some commentators to suggest that the rule proportion one’s belief to the evidence that one has in favour of that belief is an epistemic norm, although this is controversial. Epistemological theories which analyse the key epistemic concepts like *justification entirely in terms of whether the agent in question adheres to (or at least does not flout) the epistemic norms are known as deonto- logical theories, though such accounts have fallen out of favour in contemporary epistemology. Instead, the cur- rently dominant view of epistemic norms is that they should play only a peripheral role in one’s epistemological theory. Indeed, the view that a deontological conception of justification is not an essential component of *know- ledge is often thought to be a defining thesis of epistemo- logical externalism, a subspecies of which is *naturalised epistemology. d.pri. R. W. Miller, ‘The Norms of Reason’, Philosophical Review, 104 (1995). J. Pollock, ‘Epistemic Norms’, in his Contemporary Theories of Knowledge (Lanham, Md., 1986), ch. 5. Norwegian philosophy. Norway enjoys a varied and vig- orous philosophical life. Yet by European and even Scan- dinavian standards her academic institutions are of quite recent origin. The 400-year Dano-Norwegian union meant that between the founding of the universities of Uppsala in Sweden and Copenhagen in the 1470s and that in 1811 of Norway’s first, the King Frederick University in Christiania (now, as the University of Oslo, Scandinavia’s largest) Copenhagen was the centre of Norwegian aca- demic life. In 1802 a Norwegian-born philosopher, scientist, and writer, Henrich (Henrik) Steffens (1773–1845), first set in motion the Romantic movement in Denmark, and when the new university opened in 1813 (a year before the dissolution) it was a Norwegian philosopher with ten years of tenure in Copenhagen who became Norway’s first Professor of Philosophy. Niels Treschow (1751–1833) was a Spinozistically inclined critic of Kant and the first notable Scandinavian proponent of determinism. He pro- 662 no-ownership theory pounded a dual-aspect theory of mind and body and argued for the primacy of particulars over universals. Treschow’s thought is summed up in a late three-volume work Om Gud, Idee- og Sandseverdenen (On God and the Worlds of Idea and Sensation) (Christiania, 1831–3). Anticipating later evolutionary theories, Treschow sur- mised that the human ability to react inwardly to outward stimuli has its origins in some animal species. The ability to react to a diverse environment interacts dynamically with a formative impulse to unity and generates the idea of the One, combining the idea of God’s immanence in all things with that of God’s transcendence and bringing with it a teleological notion of the unity of mankind. It was the Danish philosopher, aphorist, and novelist Poul Martin Møller (1794–1838), later Kierkegaard’s men- tor, who introduced Norway to Hegel, in 1827–31. The Hegelian tradition was consolidated by Marcus Jacob Monrad (1816–97), the first major thinker to succeed Treschow (in 1851). An orthodox Hegelian, Monrad was critical of most post-Hegelian thought including that of Schelling, Feuerbach, and Kierkegaard. His opposition to these, as well as to Millian politics, Comptean positivism, and Darwinism (‘purposefulness without purpose’), put him at odds with the spirit of the age, but Monrad’s objec- tions—these views and movements were one-sided and therefore latently dualistic—were acute and even pres- cient. He saw a paradigmatic case in point in what he called the Englishman’s predilection for ‘facts’ at the expense of the ‘universal idea’. What followed may seem to confirm Monrad’s diag- nosis. The early twentieth century saw a turn towards empirical psychology (facts) and psychoanalysis, the uni- versal idea being entrusted to historians of ideas (among them notably A. H. Winsnes (1889–1972)). In 1928 one of two philosophy chairs was converted during its incumbency by Harald K. Schjelderup (1895-1974) into a chair in psychology. Until after the Second World War the remaining chair, to which Arne Naess (b. 1912) was appointed in 1939, was Norway’s single tenured position in philosophy. Philosophy’s present place in Norwegian academic life, as in the society at large, is due in large measure to Naess. In the 1930s he had participated in Moritz Schlick’s seminar and retained regular contact with the *Vienna Circle despite disagreement with some of its tenets. Opposed to the views that traditional philo- sophical puzzles are pseudo-problems and that empirical investigation plays no part in philosophical discussion, Naess claimed that empirical investigations can play an evidential role in philosophical discussions. In a seminal work written in the 1930s (Erkenntnis und wissenschaftliches Verhalten (Cognition and Scientific Behaviour (Oslo, 1936)), Naess anticipated many themes familiar in post- war *analytic philosophy. His ideas had a marked influ- ence on social research in Norway, the promise of collaboration between philosophers and social scientists giving rise to the journal Inquiry, which Naess founded in 1958. Philosophers themselves were divided. Some exploited the methodology of Naess’s ‘empirical semantics’ (e.g. Harald Ofstad (1920–93)) or reconstructed it (Ingemund Gullvåg (1925–98)). Others, provoked by a residual *positivism and *behaviourism in Naess’s pro- gramme, followed a path marked out by Hans Skjervheim (1926–99) in Objectivism and the Study of Man (1959), a work which had an early influence on *Jürgen Habermas. These philosophers—among them Audun Øfsti (b. 1938) and Gunnar Skirbekk (b. 1937)—pursued inquiries into what Karl Otto Apel has labelled ‘transcendental pragmatics’, stressing discontinuities between explanation in natural science and understanding in social science. Meanwhile Naess himself, after a period of concern with systemic aspects of his combined empirical and philosophical enterprise, resigned his chair in 1970 to concentrate on ecological issues. In Norway mathematical logic is famously represented by Thoralf Skolem (1887–1963), Professor of Math- ematics in Oslo from 1938 to 1957. A classical tradition is maintained by E. A. Wyller (b. 1923). The Wittgenstein Archives are located in Bergen, where a Wittgensteinian tradition in aesthetics has also taken root. From the late 1980s, several philosophers, notably Knut Erik Tranøy (b. 1918), have co-operated in the work of new centres for research into ethical and normative aspects of science, medicine and politics. Today’s Norwegian philosophy departments house many non-Norwegians and many Norwegians have pursued their graduate studies abroad. This accounts for a degree of cross-fertilization between the ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ traditions (Jon Elster (b. 1940) (Marx), Dagfinn Føllesdal (b. 1932) (Husserl), and Alastair Hannay (b. 1932) (Kierkegaard)). A long-established introductory course (examen philo- sophicum) required of all university students, together with the founding of universities in Bergen, Trondheim, and Tromsø in the post-war years, has meant that a rapidly increasing university-trained population is conver- sant with philosophical traditions and thought, while the University of Oslo’s Institute of Philosophy has become one of Europe’s largest. a.h. *Danish philosophy; Swedish philosophy. M. J. Monrad, Den menneskelige Viljefrihed og det Onde (Human Freedom and Evil) (Christiania, 1897). A. Naess, Truth as Conceived by Those who are not Professional Philosophers (Oslo, 1939). —— Interpretation and Preciseness: A Contribution to the Theory of Communication (Oslo, 1953). H. Ofstad, An Inquiry into the Freedom of Decision (Oslo, 1961). N. Treschow, Gives der noget Begreb eller nogen Idee om eenslige ting? (Is there any Concept or Idea of Particular Things?) (Copenhagen, 1804). notations, logical. We still have not emerged from the symbolic turmoil of the early history of modern logic. A wide variety of notations are currently employed even for the simplest of logical calculi, the variety stemming from a number of competing interests ranging from typograph- ical economy to the ease with which the logical structure of formulae can be determined and proofs devised. There notations, logical 663 are two dimensions of variation: the system of punctuation and the symbols of the logical and non-logical vocabulary. There are three main systems of punctuation used to pre- vent syntactic ambiguity: the use of brackets, the dot nota- tion of Principia Mathematica, and the bracket-free Polish notation of Łukasiewicz. Differences of non-logical vocabu- lary are usually trivial differences in the choice of letters and their case. Below is a table, admittedly selective, of variations in logical vocabulary, the more common sym- bols beginning each row, Polish notation at the end. Negation –P, ~P, ¬P, P′, P ¯ , Np Disjunction P ∨ Q, Apq Conjunction P & Q, PQ, P· Q, PQ, Kpq Material conditional P → Q, P ⊃ Q, Cpq Material biconditional P ↔ Q, P ≡ Q, P ~ Q, Epq Universal quantifier (x)Fx, (∀x)Fx, ∀xFx, ΠxFx Existential quantifier (∃x)Fx, ∃xFx, (Ex)Fx, ExFx, ΣxFx Necessity operator ٗ, L Possibility operator ◊, M a.d.o. *Appendix on Logical Symbols. R. Feys and F. B. Fitch, Dictionary of Symbols of Mathematical Logic (Amsterdam, 1969). nothing: see non-being and nothing; nothingness; noth- ingness, absolute. nothingness. Philosophers have often seen nothingness as an ontological, not simply a logical, category. Plato and Plotinus regarded matter, in contrast to form, as non- being. Heidegger claimed in Being and Time and What is Metaphysics? (1929; 5th edn. 1949, tr. in Basic Writings, ed. D. Krell (London, 1967)) that the nothing, which becomes apparent in objectless Angst, is crucial to our experience; it is prior to, and forms the basis of, logical negation. Human Existenz has no ground; it arises from the abyss of nothing. It culminates in the nothingness of death, and its meaning consists in the anticipation of death. The natural interpret- ation of this (though one rejected by Heidegger) is that *Dasein confers meaning, i.e. being, on non-human beings and on itself, and thus draws them out of meaningless chaos, i.e. nothing. To avoid saying that the nothing is, he says ‘The nothing nihilates’ (Das Nichts selbst nichtet), which Carnap regarded as a paradigm of metaphysical *nonsense. For Sartre, specifically human being consists in nothing or self-negation; this is why we can discern ‘negative realities’, such as the absence of a guest. For both philosophers, man’s radical *freedom is rooted in nothingness. m.j.i. H. Kühn, Encounter with Nothingness (Hinsdale, Ill., 1949). M. Murray (ed.), Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays (New Haven, Conn., 1978). nothingness, absolute. In modern Japanese philosophy, this idea is central for many of the Kyoto School philoso- phers. It stems from the Maha¯ya¯na Buddhist notion of ‘emptiness’, according to which nothing is what it is in isol- ation, but arises and perishes only within a network of relationships with everything else. In Buddhist practice, however, one must avoid cleaving to the experience of emptiness: the nothingness that, as non-being, is the nega- tion of beings, must itself be negated before one can arrive at absolute nothingness. For Nishida the ‘locus of nothing- ness’ is the basis of all experience; for Tanabe absolute nothingness is mediation through absolute ‘Other-power’ (of Amida Buddha); in Watsuji’s ethics the individual self has to undergo absolute negation to be fully integrated into society; and for Nishitani nothingness is above all to be experienced—since it loses its absolute character if it is merely ‘thought’. There are thought-provoking parallels with das Nichts in Heidegger’s philosophy. g.r.p. *non-being and nothing; nothingness. Robert E. Carter, The Nothingness beyond God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitaro¯ (New York, 1989). nothing so absurd. Pythagoras and Plato, who are most respectable author- ities, bid us, if we would have trustworthy dreams, to pre- pare for sleep by following a prescribed course in conduct and in eating. The Pythagoreans make a point of prohibit- ing the use of beans, as if thereby the soul and not the belly was filled with wind! There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it. (Cicero, De divinatione ii. lxviii. 120) Cicero’s dialogue De divinatione attacks divination. Its apologist Quintus cites the important philosophers who have believed in it, but Marcus, his opponent, argues that ‘those superstitious and half-cracked philosophers of yours would rather appear absurd than anything else in the world’. The Stoics, for instance, regarded current dis- belief in the Delphic oracle not as a sign of superstition’s abatement but as abatement of the ‘virtue’ of local subter- ranean exhalations, which, if it had really ever existed, would obviously have been eternal. Yet Cicero himself practised augury, and defended it on other occasions in the belief that it promoted law-abiding behaviour. j.o’g. *Stoicism. nothing so extravagant and irrational. Those unhappy people were proposing schemes for per- suading monarchs to choose favourites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities and eminent services; of instructing princes to know their true interest by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employments persons qual- ified to exercise them; with many other wild and impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive, and confirmed in me the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth. (Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ch. 6) Like their scientific colleagues trying to cure flatulence by applying bellows to the rectum, philosophers at the imagined Academy of Lagado reach absurd conclusions, presuming that the world conforms to their principles. ∨ 664 notations, logical Swift was a Tory from the age of 43, and regarded the human as not ‘animal rationale’, only ‘animal rationis capax’, and wickedness as ‘all according to the due course of things’. Yet the aim of his satires was in fact social improvement, and, even if Tory pessimism pillories these as chimeras, it is after all the unworkable utopian meas- ures that are really *common-sense. Swift’s reactionary thrust is double-edged, for it ridicules the engrained human folly that engenders and necessitates it. j.o’g. noumena: see phenomena and noumena. nous . In Greek philosophy, the highest form of rationality which is capable of grasping the fundamental principles of reality. In contrast to perception, which delivers aware- ness of the changing, accidental properties of things, nous consists in understanding their essential, immutable nature. Moreover, it supersedes belief, which may attain truth but falls short of explaining the why and wherefore of things. For Aristotle, the unmoved mover of the uni- verse was a cosmic Nous. o.r.j. *prime mover. F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms (New York, 1967). novel, the philosophical. The philosophical novel is usu- ally understood as that subspecies of *fiction which endeavours to present a specific philosophical viewpoint, sometimes metaphysical, sometimes ethical, and some- times aesthetic. Thus it is perhaps closer to the allegory or roman-à-clef than to fiction proper. For whereas it is usu- ally a defect in a work of fiction that it ally itself closely with a particular viewpoint, for a philosophical novel, a grasp of the fact that a particular world-view is embodied is a pre-condition of understanding the novel. Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, for example, embodies a particular moral philosophy, one in which the virtues of an unpremeditated warmth and responsiveness are valued above an alternative morality which is essentially con- ceived as rule-governed, though Fielding’s Bildungsroman also charts the dangers and limitations of a morality which is so reactive and spontaneous. Other examples which leap to mind are the novels of George Eliot or Proust’s analysis of memory and identity in A la recherche du temps perdu. Characteristically, such philosophical ideas are illustrated rather than asserted, as in Middlemarch, where George Eliot shows us various forms of egoism. In the twentieth century the novels of Sartre presented existential themes more memorably and vividly than his philosophical writ- ing, and Camus’s The Outsider is a paradigm of the philo- sophical novel. The free exploration of literary space in interpretation is thereby placed within bounds set by the philosophical pre- suppositions of the novelist. *Interpretation is not only limited by the text but also by the recognition that a certain philosophical standpoint is involved. The decision to place a novel within this genre is consequently as much a critical act as a matter of pre-critical classification. r.a.s. *literature and philosophy; poetry. Peter Jones, Philosophy and the Novel (Oxford, 1975). Stephen D. Ross, Literature and Philosophy (New York, 1969). Nozick, Robert (1938–2002). A philosopher of remarkably varied interests, whose most influential work presented an articulate defence of a bare-bones *libertarianism. Nozick argued that the state cannot have a very large role in the economy and society if the libertarian rights of indi- viduals are to prevail. In general, he argued against end- state theories, such as *utilitarianism or John Rawls’s theory of *justice, and in favour of process theories that focus on the rightness of piecemeal actions independently of their contribution to a final state of affairs. Nozick had a gift for finding memorable cases to represent his problems and an energetic style that pulls readers into debate. He also worked on decision theory, epistemology, theory of value, and the good life. r.har. *conservatism. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford, 1974). —— Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass., 1981). —— The Nature of Rationality (Princeton, NJ, 1993). n -tuple: see ordered set. number. There are several kinds. Ordinal numbers pro- vide the structure to order collections of distinct objects (first, second, third, etc.); cardinal numbers are used to indicate the sizes of collections of distinct objects (zero, one, two). Natural numbers are finite cardinal numbers. Integers are whole numbers, including negative numbers. Rational numbers are ratios of integers, sometimes called ‘fractions’. Real numbers are used to measure (poten- tially) continuous quantities in terms of a unit, such as length in meters and mass in grams. Complex numbers include so-called ‘imaginary numbers’, which are square roots of negative real numbers. Arithmetic, number the- ory, and real and complex analysis study the structures of the various number systems. There are philosophical problems concerning the ontological status of the various numbers—do they exist, are they mental, etc.—and there are epistemological problems concerning how we know anything about numbers. There are theories of infinitely large numbers. Con- temporary *set theory, derived from the work of Georg Cantor and Ernst Zermelo, studies both infinite cardinals and infinite ordinals. It can be shown that there are just as many integers and rational numbers as there are natural numbers, in that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the sets. Nevertheless, Cantor showed that there are distinct infinite cardinal numbers and, in particular, that for any set S, the set of all subsets of S is larger than S. A set is said to be ‘countable’ or ‘denumerable’ if it is the same size as or smaller than the natural numbers, the smallest infinite set. (*Continuum problem.) There are also theories of ‘infinitesimals’, which are like real numbers, but are infinitely small. Infinitesimals came up in the study of continuous change, such as motion, number 665 both in the medieval period and in the original develop- ment of the calculus. The theory of infinitesimals saw a rebirth in the twentieth century, through certain results in mathematical *logic. s.s. *infinity; magnitude; mathematics, problems of the philosophy of; measurement. Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam (eds.), Philosophy of Math- ematics, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1983). numinous: see holy, numinous, and sacred. Nussbaum, Martha C. (1947– ). Nussbaum first came to prominence as a scholar of classical philosophy: her sub- stantial book The Fragility of Goodness was the culmination of her work on questions to do with the meaning of life and sources of value as these are treated in Plato and Aris- totle and also in Greek tragedy. The scope of her work subsequently broadened greatly. She has sought to illumin- ate issues of moral inquiry and insight by examining how philosophy and literature overlap and show cognate con- cerns; she has examined questions of social justice and the ethics of development with particular reference to women’s place in society; and she has presented an ambi- tious theory of the emotions. She holds a joint chair in philosophy and law at the University of Chicago, with associate appointments in classics, political science, and even the divinity school. n.j.h.d. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge, 1986). —— The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, 1994). —— Sex and Social Justice (Oxford, 1998). —— Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001). 666 number Oakeshott, Michael (1901–92). British philosopher, who read history at Cambridge and taught it there for many years before taking the chair of political science at the Lon- don School of Economics in 1950. Oakeshott’s basic philo- sophical orientation was idealist. He believed that reality is mediated to us only in a number of distinct human prac- tices, such as history, morality, politics, science, philoso- phy, and poetry. Each practice is a specifically human achievement, each reveals only part of the whole, and none is superior to the rest. In becoming apprised of a practice, we enter something which must be lived and which cannot be reduced to formulae or analysed in terms of extrinsic goals. The rationalist, Oakeshott’s great bug- bear, thinks it can. Particularly in politics, he attempts to turn what should be a conversation between friends, a mode of living together, into an enterprise or set of enter- prises. The enterprise state will be deformed by ideology, by managerial techniques and abstractions, and by cease- less legislation and litigation. Oakeshott’s work has obvi- ous affinities with Wittgenstein’s and some of the same difficulties. Oakeshott’s practices, like Wittgenstein’s *language-games, are elusive, and while Oakeshott’s tar- gets are clear enough, his alternative to the modern man- agerial state is fastidiously underdefined. None the less, all politicians and most philosophers would benefit from a closer acquaintance with Oakeshott than they generally manifest. a.o’h. *conservatism; idealism, philosophical. Robert Grant, Oakeshott (London, 1990). Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (London, 1962). —— On Human Conduct (Oxford, 1975). oar in water. Favourite example of how circumstances can affect the *perception of an object, and make it seem other than it is. ‘The same object seems to us bent or straight, according to whether we see it in water or out of water’ (Plato, Republic x. 602c). Familiar in philosophy after Aristotle, the example divided sceptics (like Sextus Empiricus), who thought it showed that the senses give us no knowledge of an objective world, from Epicureans, who insisted that if there is mistake or ignorance in such cases, it must be attributed to the judgement, and not the senses (Lucretius, De rerum natura iv. 439ff). Employed later by Descartes and Berkeley, the example was hack- neyed enough by the time of Hume to count as one of the ‘trite topics, employed by sceptics in all ages, against the evidence of sense’. It continued to feature in twentieth- century discussion, used, for example, by Ayer in support of a *sense-datum theory of perception. J. L. Austin’s dry comment was: ‘What is wrong, what is even faintly surprising, in the idea of a stick’s being straight but looking bent sometimes? Does anyone suppose that if something is straight, then it jolly well has to look straight at all times and in all circumstances? Obviously no one [does] . . . So . . . what is the difficulty?’ j.bro. *representative theory of perception. J. Annas and J. Barnes, The Modes of Scepticism (Cambridge, 1985), ch. 8. J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford, 1962), iii. objectivism and subjectivism. Theories that various kinds of judgement are, respectively, objective, i.e. pertain to objects, or subjective, i.e. pertain to subjects (people). (1) ‘Fish have fins’ is an objective claim: its truth or falsity is independent of what anyone thinks or feels about the mat- ter. (2) ‘Raw fish is delicious’ is a subjective claim: its truth or falsity is not thus independent, and indeed arguably it is neither true nor false, even though taste can be sophisti- cated, discriminating, insensitive, etc. The statement (3) ‘Most Japanese find raw fish delicious (while most Britons do not)’ is an objective truth or falsehood about subjects. It is therefore perhaps surprising that one theory labelled ‘sub- jectivism’ about morality, aesthetics, etc. is the view that evaluative claims within these fields are of kind (3), while another theory asserts they are of kind (2). It is counter-productive to use a different term, ‘rela- tivism’, to mean the same as ‘subjectivism’. If by ‘rela- tivism’ we mean the theory that what is valuable (or even true) depends on changing circumstances, then it does not entail subjectivism. a.j.l. Richard Lindley, ‘The Nature of Moral Philosophy’, in G. H. R. Parkinson (ed.), An Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (London, 1988). objectivism and subjectivism, ethical. There is a range of views about moral judgements. At the subjectivist pole, they are taken to be discrete feeling-responses of O individuals to situations actual or imagined. To move towards the objectivist pole is to argue that moral judge- ments can be rationally defensible, true or false, that there are rational procedural tests for identifying morally impermissible actions, or that moral values exist indepen- dently of the feeling-states of individuals at particular times. To dismiss ‘objective moral values’ as illusions or fictions—claims the objectivist—violates our experience of the pressure they put on our will and on our emotions and interests. Only if they are misconceived as mysterious entities, lacking perceptual qualities, can they be deemed too ‘queer’ or fanciful to be taken seriously. That there can be protracted disagreement over moral issues does not rebut the objectivist: equally persistent disagreement in other fields—e.g. historical study— hardly calls in question the objective occurrence of histor- ical events. Subjectivism too has more and less plausible forms. If it sees moral judgements as simply individual avowals of feeling, then certainly no adequate account, in these terms, can be given of moral disagreement—or of deliber- ation either. To understand them as the expression and evocation of emotions and attitudes still does no justice to the logic of moral discourse. A distinctively moral point of view must be acknowledged, and the moral requirement to ‘be objective’—in the minimal but crucial sense of dis- counting selfish bias. If such a view still rests upon contin- gently common human ‘sentiments’, as for Hume it did, we have a mid-position—intersubjectivism. That has obvious attractions, but it is no less open to the object- ivists’ complaint, that this account still badly underesti- mates the resources of practical reasoning. r.w.h. J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, 1977). D. M. McNaughton, Moral Vision: An Introduction to Ethics (Oxford, 1988). T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford, 1986). objectivity, historical: see history, problems of the philosophy of. object language. When a second language is introduced to talk about a given language it is called the metalan- guage; the given language is the object language. These are relational terms: one language is an object language, another a metalanguage only in relation to one another. Thus, the metalanguage can, in turn, be an object lan- guage in relation to another language. The necessity for the object language–metalanguage distinction in seman- tic theory is revealed by the semantic paradoxes. h.w.n. John L. Pollock, Technical Methods in Philosophy (Boulder, Colo., 1990). obligation. To be under an obligation signifies being tied, required, or constrained to do (or from doing) something by virtue of a moral rule, a duty, or some other binding demand. There are also familial or parental obligations deriving from a role or relationship. Obligations are nor- mally understood to form a subset of the moral factors which impinge on a person; there are other moral con- cerns such as to be kindly or generous which are not usu- ally thought of as obligations. Kant, however, called these latter ‘broad’ obligations, allowing some latitude in their execution, in contrast to, for example, the strict obligation (as he saw it) always to tell the truth. Kant thought all moral requirements were ‘categorical’ obligations. Obliga- tions oblige one to do something in a way analogous to the way, for example, a closed road obliges one to find another route: they force or demand a course of action. Obligation is sometimes contrasted with *value, as being what is peremptory and demanding rather than enticing and attractive. The topic of moral obligation is challen- gingly discussed by G. E. M. Anscombe in her ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (1958), reprinted in her collected philo- sophical papers, Ethics, Religion and Politics, iii (Oxford, 1981). n.j.h.d. *categorical imperative; ought; ethics and aesthetics. obligationes. A late-medieval disputation-form involving two parties, the ‘opponent’ and the ‘respondent’. After laying down some proposition as the initial case, the oppon- ent proposes other propositions to the respondent, who must reply to each in turn by either conceding, denying, or doubting it. The respondent must do this according to rules describing the relation of the proposition at hand to the initial case and to what has gone before. Medieval philosophers argued about the proper rules to adopt for obligationes; one common set of rules has features of con- structive *counterfactual reasoning. The terminology and methods of obligationes appear in theological, metaphys- ical, and scientific investigations. p.k. *logic, history of. Paul Vincent Spade, ‘Three Theories of Obligationes: Burley, Kilvington, and Swyneshed on Counterfactual Reasoning’, History and Philosophy of Logic (1982). observation and theory. Provide different points of access to the world—observation from the bottom up, theory from the top down. Empiricists favour observations as a secure and objective basis for knowledge; we and the Baby- lonians would have seen eye to eye. Theory, in contrast, is prone to error and prejudice; too many theories have turned out to be false and require speculative conjectures. Advocates of theory find observationally based epistemol- ogies too pinched in their scope; attempts by the logical empiricists and others to construct theory on the basis of observations failed dramatically. Yet there is great danger in speculative theory, especially in the social sciences where data is scarce, and a judicious balance between theory and data is the hallmark of good practice. What is observed is generally agreed to exist, but *realists, in contrast to *empiricists, allow that some non-observational terms in well-confirmed theories genuinely refer. p.h. Robert Klee, Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Oxford, 1997), ch. 3. 668 objectivism and subjectivism, ethical obversion. A proposition is obverted by negating its sec- ond term and changing its *quality from affirmative to negative or vice versa. Thus ‘All rabbits are herbivores’ (All S are P) becomes ‘No rabbit is a non-herbivore’ (No S are non-P). All the four forms of proposition considered by traditional logic may be validly obverted. c.w. *logic, traditional. J. N. Keynes, Formal Logic, 4th edn. (London, 1906), ch. 4. occasionalism. A theory about the nature of much of what we take to be causation. It asserts that all relations between physical things, or between human minds and physical things, which we intuitively suppose to be causal, are in fact not causal. Instead, the relations are a consequence of God’s will in the sense that particular events, the ‘causes’, are constantly conjoined with other events, their ‘effects’, because when a cause occurs God wills the effect to occur. One reason it was put forward was as the only conceivable explanation of causal necessity. p.j.p.n. *causality; parallelism, psychological; pre-established harmony. N. Malebranche, The Search after Truth (1674–5), tr. T. M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Columbus, Oh., 1980), vi. ii. 3. Ockham, William (1285–1347). An English Franciscan dubbed the ‘More than Subtle Doctor’, Ockham defended *nominalism, condemning the doctrine that universals are real things other than names or concepts as ‘the worst error of philosophy’. Rejecting *atomism in favour of *hylomorphism, he practised poverty in metaphysics by refusing to posit distinct kinds of entities for each of Aristotle’s ten categories and restricting his philosophical diet to really distinct substances and qualities with certain relations thrown in for good theological measure. Yet, he defended the Franciscan school’s recognition of a plurality of substantial forms in living things (in humans, really distinct forms of corporeity, of sensory and intellec- tual soul). By contrast with Hume and Malebranche, Ockham maintains the Aristotelian distinction between efficient *causality properly speaking and sine qua non causality, based on whether the correlation between As and Bs is produced by A’s power or by the will of another. Against Henry of Ghent, he denies that there is any sine qua non causality in nature, and finds it metaphysically impossible that regularities in nature be drastically rearranged, although natural functioning can be obstructed by God and creatures alike. Like other Aristotelians, Ockham deems physics and biology possible because the uniform- ity of nature principle is true. Even for a nominalist, natures are powers; co-specific individuals, maximally similar powers that operate in maximally similar ways. An Aristotelian reliabilist in epistemology, Ockham takes for granted that human cognitive faculties work ‘always or for the most part’—indeed, that we have certain knowledge of material things and of our own mental acts. Ockham draws no sceptical conclusions from the logical, metaphysical, or natural possibility of their obstruction, because he defines certainty in terms of free- dom from actual error. Notoriously enthusiastic about logic, Ockham’s dis- tinctive treatment of the logic of terms (‘supposition the- ory’) reflects his metaphysical disagreements with other notables (e.g. William of Sherwood, Peter of Spain, and Walter Burleigh). His Summa Logicae rearranges the trad- itional syllabus somewhat by subsuming the ‘topics’ under the theory of inference; and contains his brilliant and extensive development of modal syllogistic. In action theory, Ockham defends the liberty of indif- ference or contingency for divine and created rational beings. Not only is the will a self-determining power for opposites (as Scotus insisted), its options include willing evil under the aspect of evil and willing against good under the aspect of good! So far as non-positive morality or ethics is concerned, Ockham endorses a ‘modified right reason theory’, according to which virtuous action requires the agent’s free co-ordination of choice with right reason (the primary norm). Because suitably informed right reason dictates that God, the infinite good, should be loved above all and for his own sake and hence obeyed, *divine commands become a secondary norm. Priorities are reversed in the soteriological category of merit and demerit, where free and contingent divine statutes make following the dictates of right reason a necessary condi- tion of merit and eternal blessedness. Excommunicated for his defiant defence of Franciscan poverty against Pope John XXII, Ockham spent the rest of his career under the protection of Louis of Bavaria, ener- getically promoting a ‘separation of Church and State’ according to which the authority of neither is regulariter subordinate to that of the other, although each might inter- fere with the other casualiter in a grave crisis. m.m.a. *reliabilism. Marilyn McCord Adams, William Ockham, 2 vols. (Notre Dame, Ind., 1987). Philotheus Boehner, Collected Articles on Ockham, ed. Eligius M. Buytaert, OFM (St Bonaventure, NY, 1958). Guillelmi de Ockham: Opera Philosophica et Theologica (St Bonaven- ture, NY, 1967), i–vi, i–x. Arthur Stephen McGrade, The Political Thought of William of Ock- ham: Personal and Institutional Principles (London, 1974). P. V. Spade (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ockham (Cam- bridge, 2000). Ockham’s razor, or the principle of parsimony. A methodological principle dictating a bias towards *sim- plicity in theory construction, where the parameters of simplicity vary from kinds of entity to the number of pre- supposed axioms to characteristics of curves drawn between data points. Although found in Aristotle, it became associated with William Ockham because it cap- tures the spirit of his philosophical conclusions. m.m.a. Marilyn McCord Adams, William Ockham (Notre Dame, Ind., 1987), ch. 5, pp. 143–67. Ockham’s razor, or the principle of parsimony 669 . Plainly, the detour through A & B was redundant; the two lines on which stood, first, A & B and then A can be excised, together with the entire part of the derivation leading to the premiss. designating the body to which the experiences are causally linked, in the third person. The theory was attributed by P. F. Strawson to middle-period Wittgenstein and to Schlick. Its point is to avoid. (Harmondsworth, 1977). D. M. McNaughton, Moral Vision: An Introduction to Ethics (Oxford, 1988). T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford, 1986). objectivity, historical: see history, problems of the philosophy of. object