The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 70 potx

O’Neill, Onora (1941– ). British moral and political philosopher. She has written on Kant’s moral philosophy and employs a Kantian approach in considering ethical and political issues, including such traditionally neglected issues as the position of children and the role of parenting, gender, and questions of international justice. She criti- cizes much political and moral philosophy which is commonly called Kantian by both its proponents and detractors. Such work often emphasizes moral impera- tives and duties; but is not really true to Kant’s emphasis on principles that can be universally adopted. In recent (mainly US) liberal political philosophy *‘Kantianism’ is understood to be rights-based and therefore to de- emphasize such categories as virtue, need, and obligation. O’Neill argues that a properly Kantian approach encom- passes these categories. e.j.f. Onora O’Neill, Faces of Hunger (London, 1986). —— Constructions of Reason (Cambridge, 1989). —— Towards Justice and Virtue (Cambridge, 1996). —— Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics (Cambridge, 2002). one-over-many problem. How can many things, e.g. Frances, Sarah, and Geoffrey, all be one thing, e.g. left- handed? Age-old solutions postulate a ‘universal’, e.g. the idea of left-handedness, related to these particulars and standing ‘over’ them. Doubtless various kinds of such *universals exist. But we can still ask: How can many things all be related-to-one-universal? Explanation of ‘being so-and-so’—predication—seems inevitably to pre- suppose the very thing it seeks to explain. c.a.k. D. F. Pears, ‘Universals’, in A. Flew (ed.), Logic and Language, 2nd series (Oxford, 1955). ontological argument for the existence of God. A line of argument which appears to appeal to no contingent fact at all, but only to an analysis of the concept of God. The argument is that this concept (unlike many others) is necessarily instantiated. Sometimes an intermediate step is the argument that if it is possible for this concept to be instantiated then it is instantiated, and this concept is obviously possible. Anselm gives the classical formulation, and the classical critique is Immanuel Kant’s. The argument has recently been subtly reformulated and defended by (among others) Charles Hartshorne, Norman Malcolm, and Alvin Plantinga. g.i.m. Anselm, Proslogion, tr. S. N. Deane (La Salle, Ill., 1991). Alvin Plantinga, The Ontological Argument: From St Anselm to Con- temporary Philosophers (Garden City, NY, 1965). ontology. Ontology, understood as a branch of metaphysics, is the science of *being in general, embracing such issues as the nature of *existence and the categorial structure of reality. That existing *things belong to different categories is an idea traceable at least back to Aristotle. Different systems of ontology propose alternative categorial schemes. A categorial scheme typically exhibits a hier- archical structure, with ‘being’ or ‘entity’ as the topmost category, embracing everything that exists. Some schemes take the division between *universals and particulars as the next step in the hierarchy, others the division between abstract and concrete entities. These divisions do not necessarily coincide, since some philosophers believe in the existence of *concrete universals and some in the existence of abstract particulars. Universals may be further subdivided into properties, kinds, and relations. While many metaphysicians hold universals to be abstract entities, they disagree over whether universals exist separ- ately from the particulars which instantiate them (the ‘Platonic’ view) or only exist ‘within’ those particulars (the ‘Aristotelian’ view). There is also disagreement over what distinguishes abstract from concrete entities, the most common view being that abstract entities do not exist in physical space and *time, and so lack physical extension and do not undergo change. As a corollary it is often held that abstract entities lack causal powers and so are incap- able of entering into causal relations with other entities, though this threatens to make our knowledge of abstract entities problematic. Many philosophers, for this and related reasons, deny the existence of abstract entities, holding that only concrete particulars exist. Concrete particulars are commonly further divided into *substances and non-substances, the hallmark of the former being that they are logically capable of independent existence, whereas non-substances depend logically for their existence upon that of other things, and ultim- ately upon the existence of substances. Material bodies provide the most obvious example of particular substances, but Cartesian egos or souls, if they existed, would also belong to this category. The concrete non-substances traditionally include such entities as particular events, particular qualities, and particular places and times. How- ever, some revisionist metaphysicians hold that some or all of these categories are in fact more basic than the category of material objects, attempting to construct the latter from ‘bundles’ of particular events or qualities located at particular places and times. Traditional ontological concerns, such as those just described, are currently enjoying a modest revival after a period of neglect prompted by widespread opposition to metaphysics. It is now better appreciated that the natural sciences embody implicit ontological schemes which cannot be wholly justified on purely empirical grounds and which can on occasion engender theoretical perplexities, as in the quantum-mechanical disputes over wave– particle duality. Only metaphysical reflection can ultim- ately dispel such perplexities. The term ‘ontology’ has some additional special uses in philosophy. In a derivative sense, it is used to refer to the set of things whose existence is acknowledged by a particular theory or system of thought: it is in this sense that one speaks of ‘the’ ontology of a theory, or of a metaphysical system as having such-and-such an ontology (for example, an ontology of events, or of material substances). In a separate, technical sense the term ‘ontology’ is the official name of a logistical system created by the Polish logician 670 O’Neill, Onora Stanisław Lesńiewski—a system similar in scope to modern predicate logic and developed by him in conjunction with *mereology, the formal theory of part–whole relations. Lesńiewski’s system differs in important respects from the now orthodox formal logic of Frege and Russell, especially in the more general role it assigns to names. e.j.l. K. Campbell, Abstract Particulars (Oxford, 1990). R. Grossmann, The Existence of the World: An Introduction to Ontol- ogy (London, 1992). M. Loux and D. Zimmerman (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Meta- physics (Oxford, 2003). S. McCall, Polish Logic 1920–1939 (Oxford, 1967). opacity and transparency: see referential opacity. opacity, opaque contexts: see referential opacity. open and closed thought. Modern theories of knowledge focus on change of *belief. They ask what, given a background of beliefs and expectations, is the best way to change one’s beliefs in the face of new evidence. A fertile and flexible system of beliefs will be able to change in response to unexpected evidence. This gives it a chance of containing truths. Similar points hold for desires and for emotions. Some systems of belief, desire, and emotion are such that they can evolve. Others are traps from which it is hard to escape, as they have ways of reinterpreting or neutralizing the impact of contrary evidence, unwelcome example, or unorthodox art. One function of philosophical *scepticism is to combat the tendency to closure in human ways of thinking. Yet total openness is probably impossible: a more reasonable ideal is that of a flexible cage, which can slowly change its shape. Indeed, the claim to have a completely open mind is usually a sign of some deep and inflexible self-deception. a.m. Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (London, 1961). W. V. Quine and J. Ullian, The Web of Belief (New York, 1970). open question argument. Argument used by G. E. Moore against ethical naturalists, especially J. S. Mill. Influenced by Hume on ‘is’ and ‘ought’, the argument runs thus: Naturalists claim that ethical words—e.g. ‘good’—can be defined in natural terms—e.g. ‘pleasure- maximizing’. But, since it is an open question whether what maximizes pleasure is good, the definition fails, com- mitting the *naturalistic fallacy. It is not an open question whether, say, bachelors are unmarried men, so a definition of ‘bachelor’ as ‘unmarried man’ would succeed. Since Mill was trying not to define ethical words, but to tell us what is good (something Moore himself does), the argument fails ad hominem. It was taken over by emotivist and prescriptivist anti-naturalists, though Moore himself used it to support non-naturalism. r.c. *fact–value distinction; non-natural properties. T. Baldwin, G. E. Moore (London, 1990), ch. 3. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge, 1903). open texture. This term has been used for an apparently unavoidable feature of empirical *concepts, namely that there is always the possibility of some unforeseen kind of case in which it is not clear whether, or how, the concept should be applied. Wittgenstein’s discussion of *rules strongly supports this. Open texture is not *vagueness, but more like the possibility of vagueness; not all concepts are actually vague. For example, until the advent of test-tube fertilization, biological motherhood was a precise concept, but now ‘mother’ is ambiguous between ‘she who was the source of genes’ and ‘she who gave birth’. The concept was always open-textured, because it could not provide in advance for all such possible new situations. l.f.s. F. Waismann, ‘Verifiability’, in G. H. R. Parkinson (ed.), The The- ory of Meaning (Oxford, 1968). operation. An expression E 1 operates on another expression (or expressions), E 2 , when a further expression, E 3 , results, and where E 2 is (or are) said to fall within the scope of E 1 . E 1 might be ‘Tom thinks that’; E 2 , ‘Mike is a vegetarian’; E 3 will be ‘Tom thinks that Mike is a vegetarian’. The operators most commonly discussed by logicians are operators on sentences (like ‘Tom thinks that’), particularly *truth-functional ones, where the truth-value of the sentence E 3 would be a function of the truth-value of the sentence(s) E 2 . Examples of truth-functional operators are ‘It’s not the case that’ (or ‘not’) and ‘or’. r.p.l.t. W. Hodges, Logic (Harmondsworth, 1977), sects. 12–14. operationalism. A grass-roots movement in philosophy of science, articulated and defended by P. W. Bridgman, which grew out of what was perceived to be the actual practice and views of physicists around the time that the theories of relativity and *quantum mechanics were first developed. Like *Logical Positivism, operationalism emphasizes close contact with experiment as necessary to objective discourse, but focuses on concepts rather than statements, seeking to safeguard them against meaning- lessness by defining them solely with reference to precisely defined experimental operations. For example, ‘the length of a table’ may be said to be the number of times a measuring-rod needs to be laid end to end on the table, going from one end of it to the other. If there is more than one way to measure length, such as recording the time taken for light to travel out and back along the table, then there is more than one concept of ‘length’ involved. Fur- thermore, questions which cannot be decisively answered with reference to operations are banned from science, such as ‘Did everything in the universe double in size overnight?’ Given the radical departure of modern *physics from previously sacrosanct ideas such as Euclid- ean geometry, it is not difficult to see why Bridgman sought to purify scientific concepts operationally so as to avoid any further impediments to progress. r.cli. P. W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics (New York, 1927). optimism: see pessimism and optimism. optimism 671 or: see conjunction and disjunction. ordered pair: see ordered set. ordered set, or n- tuple. Set (of any size, e.g. ordered pair or 2-tuple) in which order and repetition matter. For example, since Russell knew Leibniz’s work but not con- versely, and each knew his own work, the relation knew the work of holds of the ordered pairs 〈Russell, Leibniz〉, 〈Russell, Russell〉 and 〈Leibniz, Leibniz〉, but not of 〈Leib- niz, Russell〉. By contrast the (unordered) pair {Russell, Leibniz} is the same as {Leibniz, Russell}, and {Russell, Russell} is just {Russell}. c.a.k. G. J. Massey, Understanding Symbolic Logic (New York, 1970), app. A. ordinary language and philosophy. If proof were needed that philosophy cannot be reduced to or conducted wholly in ordinary language, some is provided by the fact that the two are in conflict. Ordinary language has largely succeeded in obscuring or obliterating vital linguistic differences, and thus in subverting distinctions that are essential to philosophical discourse. Consider the word ‘valid’, which has a clear meaning in logic but an unclear (though popular) use in ordinary language. Even more, consider the following pairs: begs the question–raises the question; reform–change; refute–reject; infer–imply; dis- interested–uninterested. In everyday language the first term of each pair has largely replaced the second, thus making the distinction unintelligible in most contexts, and impoverishing conceptual and analytical resources. How- ever, whereas close attention to language is essential in philosophy, the ideas that all philosophical problems are problems in language, or that they can be settled by gram- matical analysis, or attention to everyday usage, are quite different and quite absurd. Philosophy can and should concern itself with genuine, substantive problems, and like any other problem-solving discourse is fully entitled to its own necessary technical terms. a.bel. *analytic philosophy; philosophical inquiry: first premisses and principles; Wittgenstein; linguistic philosophy. Oswald Hanfling, Ordinary Language and Philosophy (London, 1999). ordinary-language philosophy: see linguistic philosophy; J. L. Austin. organic society. A view of society as a unitary natural growth, as opposed to views which depict it as an aggre- gate of individuals pursuing self-interest or as a planned or constructed entity. If society is seen in terms of the biological metaphor of a living organism, certain features are typically attributed to it. It is thought to persist through time, and conse- quently the importance of maintaining tradition is stressed. Since it has grown rather than been constructed, it ought not to be subjected to sudden and drastic changes, for drastic change may weaken or destroy it. The parts of an organism are mutually dependent, and indeed their identity depends on there being members of one organism rather than another. This implication is characteristic- ally extended not just to the institutions of society but to the individual persons who have their being in it. In some political philosophies, notably that of Hegel, the organic view passes from metaphor to metaphysics and society as the Volkgeist is thought literally to have a life of its own. In that direction lies totalitarianism and racism. But the metaphor need not be twisted in that direction and in the moderate position of Burke the organic view of society offers a persuasive rival to the metaphors of building, construction, and planning. r.s.d. *conservatism. E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth, 1968). Ted Honderich, Conservatism (London, 1990). original position. In Rawls’s theory, the imaginary situation in which principles of *justice are to be chosen. We are asked to agree in advance on principles for evaluating social institutions under a *veil of ignorance—as if we didn’t know what place we would occupy in the society. It is a hypothetical social contract designed to ensure that the principles chosen will be fair to all, because if you don’t know who you are, you have to be equally concerned for the interests of everyone—though it may be just as difficult to decide what you should choose in this situation as it is to decide what is just. t.n. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). original sin. According to this Christian doctrine, the *sin of early humans, represented in the Hebrew Bible by Adam and Eve disobeying a divine command not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, had disastrous consequences for their progeny. An influential tradition founded by Augustine claims that the descendants of Adam inherit by causal transmission from him both an innate propensity to sin and innate *guilt. This view is problematic because it seems that guilt can be neither inherited nor innate. p.l.q. *shame. N. P. Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin (London, 1927). origination. The creation of new causal chains by free human choices. The traditional doctrine of free will or *lib- ertarianism asserts that there are such genuine creations. Not everything is a link in a deterministic causal chain. Ran- dom atomic variations are, of course, not sufficient for origination, which requires a kind of control by the *will, a self, a soul, or a mind—this being required for *responsibility. Determinists argue that origination does not exist, or that it is an essentially vacuous and unintelligible notion filling the space where a genuine cause should be. r.c.w. 672 or *freedom and determinism; determinism. J. C. Eccles and K. R. Popper, The Self and its Brain (Berlin, 1977). T. Honderich, A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience, and Life-Hopes (Oxford, 1988). Ortega y Gasset, José (1883–1955). Philosopher and essayist, born in Madrid. Among his most influential books are El tema de nuestro tiempo (1923) and La rebelión de las masas (1932). Ortega’s two most distinctive contribu- tions to philosophy are a metaphysics of vital reason and a perspectival epistemology. For Ortega, reality and truth are defined with respect to my life, a combination of myself and my circumstances (‘yo soy yo y mi circunstan- cia’). Something is real only in so far as it is rooted and appears in my life. The *self is not an entity separate from what surrounds it; there is a dynamic interaction and interdependence of self and things which together constitute reality. Because every life is the result of an interaction between self and circumstances, every self has a unique perspective and truth is perspectival. j.g. e.m. Andrew Dobson, An Introduction to the Politics and Philosophy of José Ortega y Gasset (New York, 1989). ostensive definition. Explaining the meaning of a word by ostension, by pointing to something to which the word applies, has been variously thought to constitute (i) a form of explanation which provides language with a founda- tion, (ii) an explanation which, in presupposing a general grasp of language, is only secondary, and (iii) a procedure which does not qualify as a *definition or explanation at all. While ostension may serve to point the learner in the right general direction, there is certainly a question as to how much eventual understanding may owe to any such procedure, and how much it requires exposure to word usage over a period of time. b.b.r. B. Rundle, Wittgenstein and Contemporary Philosophy of Language (Oxford, 1990). Other. Primarily understood as the other human being in his or her differences. The problem of *other minds was first formulated clearly by John Stuart Mill in An Examin- ation of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, although there are clear antecedents in Descartes. It was taken up by Husserl in the Fifth of his Cartesian Meditations where the other is constituted as an alter ego. However, it is only with Levinas that the philosophy of the Other was freed from the epistemological problematic. In Totality and Infinity Levinas charged previous philosophy, including that of Husserl, with reducing the Other to an object of consciousness and thereby failing to maintain its absolute alterity: the rad- ically Other transcends me and the totality into whose net- work I seek to place it. According to Levinas, by challenging my self-assurance the Other opens the question of ethics. The priority of the Other becomes equivalent to the primacy of ethics over ontology. Questions have been raised about this conception of the Other. Derrida asked whether the absolute alterity of the Other is not inevitably compromised by the fact that the Other is other than what is given initially. The logical problem has especially devastating consequences in the political realm, particularly if the Other is not accorded the ethical priority Levinas gives it. In this way the now widespread use of the language of otherness in anthropological discourse to describe the West’s encounter with non- Western cultures tends to keep the dominant discourse intact, just as the reference to the feminine as Other reasserts male privilege. The notion of the Other is also used by other European thinkers in a broader sense. Death, madness, the unconscious are all said to be Other. In each case the challenge of the Other is the same: that in some way the Other cannot be encapsulated within the thought-forms of Western philosophy without reducing the alterity of the Other. r.l.b. J. Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference (Chicago, 1978). M. Theunissen, The Other (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). other minds. A problem in the theory of knowledge about whether—and if so, how—one can know, or be justified in believing, that other individuals (humans and animals) have thoughts and feelings. Also sometimes taken to include a related question: How do we know that plants and rocks (not to mention machines) do not have minds? Also, more specifically, a problem about the character of another’s thoughts and feelings: How do I know straw- berries taste the same to you as they do to me? Assuming that one has some kind of *introspective access to one’s own thoughts and feelings (so that there is no problem about one’s own mind), the problem of other minds is usually taken to be a question about what our judgements about other people’s minds are based on. Are they based solely on observable behaviour? If so, what reason do we have to think that such behaviour is a reli- able symptom (expression) of mental activity? If people can act one way and feel another, if they can believe something without ever showing it, why not suppose a daffodil does the same—thinks and feels without ever showing it? If a machine can beat us at chess without (according to some) having a mental life, why suppose our neighbour is any different? *Behaviourism is a view that identifies mental activity with behavioural tendencies and dispositions. If someone acts jealous and is disposed, in a wide variety of circumstances, to behave jealously, then that person is jealous. There is no further fact about this mental state that is hid- den from our view. Behaviourism provides a convenient solution to the problem of other minds since, according to it, ‘other minds’ are as accessible as ‘other behaviour’. This solution to the problem does not, today, enjoy much support. Although some aspects of our mental life may consist of behavioural tendencies (vanity and shyness, for example), others do not. An itch isn’t just a tendency to scratch. For those who (unlike behaviourists) take the mental life of another person or animal to consist of inner, other minds 673 unobservable (by others), events and states, the argument from analogy has always been an attractive answer to the problem of other minds. Just as I am entitled to infer that X will do A because it resembles in a variety of significant ways (is analogous to) Y, and Y generally does A, so we know (or at least are reasonable in believing) X feels pain because X resembles me—acts in many of the same ways I do—when I feel pain. Arguments from analogy have been criticized as a very feeble sort of argument for other minds—much too feeble to support the knowledge claims we typically advance about such matters. It is true that I tend to yell and suck my finger when I burn it. I do so because it hurts. But is this a reason to conclude, by analogy, that it must also hurt my neighbour because he behaves that way when he burns his finger? Perhaps it is, but the inference is from a single case (one’s own case), and analogies from a single case are notoriously weak. Is the fact that one chocolate in the box, the one you ate first, was caramel-filled a reason to think that every (any?) other similar-looking chocolate will be filled with caramel? Is it a good enough reason to say you know it is? The argument from analogy can be strengthened by looking not at a single piece of behaviour but at the full range of behaviour exhibited by other organisms. Many philosophers have thought that verbal behaviour is particularly relevant. People say it hurts. At least they make noises similar to those I make when I say it hurts. We can, of course, make machines that will produce the same noises when they are poked, but will they (can they?) exhibit the full range of dispositions—verbal and other- wise—that human beings do? There is also the fact that other human beings (and some animals) have nervous systems remarkably like one’s own—something daffodils, rocks, and computers lack. In so far as there is reason to think mental activity *supervenes on the neural substrate (something that many materialistic theories of the mind maintain), then this similarity of hardware is an even stronger analogical basis for inferring similarity of mental life in biologically and behaviourally similar organisms. f.d. *introspection; Other; persons; supervenience. C. D. Broad, The Mind and its Place in Nature (London, 1925). N. Malcolm, ‘Knowledge of Other Minds’, Journal of Philosophy, 23 (1958). H. H. Price, ‘Our Evidence for the Existence of Other Minds’, Philosophy, 13 (1938). G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, 1949). other-regarding actions: see self-regarding and other- regarding actions. ought. ‘Ought’ can express purely personal counsel—‘I ought to move my Queen, or I’ll lose it next move’. It can also express an impersonal or ‘transpersonal’ moral imperative. I may be urging myself (or another similarly placed) towards morally desirable or necessary action, or away from the morally deplorable. The context of its use may be the small scale of an individual act, or the grandest scale of a vision of what human life ‘ought to be like’. Essential to the moral ‘ought’ is the sense of a strong con- straint laid upon the will: it contrasts with the operating of a moral ideal which, rather, beckons and attracts the moral agent. ‘Why ought I?’ is a legitimate question, inviting answer in terms of intelligible moral rules or practices, until one reaches such an ultimate limit as, for example, respect for persons or right to life. It may be argued that ‘ought implies can’, in the strenuous sense that to recognize an unconditional moral ‘ought’ itself supplies the motivation to respond. r.w.h. *‘is’ and ‘ought’; obligation; ideals, moral. J. N. Findlay, Values and Intentions (London, 1961). ‘ought’ and ‘is’: see ‘is’ and ‘ought’. overdetermination and underdetermination. The problem of overdetermination is a problem for our understanding of *causality. An effect is overdetermined when it has two independent causes, each sufficient on its own for its effect. The problem is that in such cases neither cause satisfies our ordinary criteria for causal efficacy: neither cause, for example, is necessary in the circumstance for the effect. So we either have to deny that causal overdetermination occurs, or show that our preferred account is not incom- patible with it, or modify that account. The problem of underdetermination concerns the relationship between *theory (scientific theory, or any generalization) and the *empirical data. For any given theory, the evidence will never determine the choice between that theory and some rival theory. The problem then is to show how theory choice can ever be rational. r.le p. *induction; translation, indeterminacy of. J. L. Mackie, The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation (Oxford, 1974). overman: see superman. Owen, G. E. L. (1922–82). Gwil Owen greatly influenced the study of ancient philosophy world-wide. He was professor successively in Oxford, Harvard, and Cambridge. He published a few very influential articles, notably on the place of the Timaeus in Plato’s philosophy and on the role of dialectic in Aristotle’s philosophical method; and he was a protagonist in the group of European scholars which produced the series of Symposia Aristotelica. A recurring theme in his work was the importance of method and argument, as against thesis and doctrine, in the practice and history of philosophy. He applied this insight to challenge a number of orthodoxies in the interpretation of Plato and Aristotle. Owen was active in the recruitment and motivation of graduate students and junior faculty members. His medium was the cut-and- thrust of dialectic, through which he showed that the study of ancient philosophy demands philosophical acuity combined with philological rigour. A seminal article, 674 other minds Oxford philosophy 675 which illustrates many features of his thought and style, is ‘The Platonism of Aristotle’, reprinted in his Logic, Science and Dialectic (London, 1986). j.d.g.e. owl of Minerva. Minerva, the Roman goddess of *wisdom, was the equivalent of the Greek goddess Athena. She was associated with the owl, traditionally regarded as wise, and hence a metaphor for philosophy. Hegel wrote, in the pref- ace to his Philosophy of Right: ‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.’ He meant that philosophy understands reality only after the event. It cannot prescribe how the world ought to be. p.s. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1967). Oxford Calculators. In the 1320s and 1330s, a group of natural philosophers based at Oxford—principally Thomas Bradwardine, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead—produced a series of path-breaking treatises on the analysis of motion. Distinguishing between the study of motion with regard to its causes and its study with regard to its effects, they developed a quasi-mathematical account of the latter in which motions are characterized in terms of ‘intensive’ magnitudes which cannot be measured directly, but must be assessed according to their spatio-temporal effects. s.gau. N. Kretzmann et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1982). Oxford philosophy. The study and teaching of philosophy in Oxford go back at least to the early thirteenth- century Augustinian, or Neoplatonist, Robert Grosseteste, one of the few medieval philosophers to know Greek. In the early fourteenth century Duns Scotus and William of Ockham were the most important of a large number of Franciscan scholars who opposed the rationalism of the Dominican St Thomas Aquinas. They held that reason is not competent to establish any but the most general elem- ents of religious faith. In their epoch Oxford superseded Paris as the centre of philosophical study. After the Black Death of 1348 and, even more, after the heresies of Wyclif had led, later in that century, to the imposition of ecclesi- astical control over religious speculation, Oxford remained, for the most part, philosophically infertile for some 500 years. Hobbes and Locke studied there, unprof- itably in their opinion, and Locke taught in Oxford for some years, but neither became a philosopher until a con- siderable time after they had left it. Two distinguished philosophers taught in Oxford around the middle of the nineteenth century in an isolated and, philosophically, uninfluential way: J. H. Newman, drawing on Aristotle, the British Empiricists, and Bishop Butler, and H. L. Mansel, chief disciple of the last important Scottish philosopher, Sir William Hamilton. Newman’s theory of belief and Mansel’s theory of the limits of religious thought remotely echo the resistance of Scotus and Ockham to the pretensions of reason in the domain of religious belief. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century a major new school emerged: the anglicized *Hegelianism that was initiated by T. H. Green and had as its most distinguished exponent F. H. Bradley. They rejected the claim of the common view of the world, and of its scientific extension, to be genuine knowledge, seeing it as a prac- tical makeshift, riddled with internal contradictions. True knowledge can be achieved, not by the analytic understanding, but only by that philosophic reason which rec- ognizes that nature is a product of mind or, at any rate, is formed and articulated by it. Russell and Moore in Cambridge drove this idealistic orthodoxy from the field, even if its adherents long con- tinued to dominate the philosophical professoriate of the British Isles. Its last notable exponent was the brilliant but intellectually wayward R. G. Collingwood. *Idealism was less impressively criticized on its home ground by J. Cook Wilson and H. A. Prichard, in and after the Edwardian decade. They set about it with something of the relentless literalism of G. E. Moore, but with a numbing rather than inspiring effect. In the 1930s Oxford philosophy came to life again. The new Cambridge ideas had been imported with style, rigour, and authority by H. H. Price and were given a more radical turn by Gilbert Ryle. He took philosophy to be concerned not so much with genuine problems as with puzzles or muddles. ‘The whole and sole task of philosophy’, he wrote, ‘is . . . the detection of the sources in linguistic idiom of recurrent misconstructions and absurd theories’. That conviction culminated in his chief work, The Concept of Mind (1949) in which mind–body *dualism is attributed to a mistaken assimilation of statements about minds to statements about physical things. The former, he contends, do not report private inner episodes of thought and feeling but refer to the dispositions of human bodies to act, and talk, in certain ways in given circumstances. The Oxford philosophy of ordinary language, as it came to be called, received its most exquisite expression in the highly entertaining work of J. L. Austin, who shared Moore’s power to dominate a generation of philosophers by the force of his personality and exceeded Moore in the refinement of his linguistic discrimination. After Austin’s death in 1960, the return of A. J. Ayer to Oxford after a twenty-year absence, and a focusing of interest on the work of W. V. Quine and other American analytic philosophers, the ordinary-language school disintegrated and nothing specifically Oxonian has replaced it. a.q. philosophy in britain: late twentieth century a. j. ayer brought logical positivism from Vienna to Oxford, presenting it as continuous with the British empiricist tradition. For fifty years he was a figurehead of philosophy in Britain, addressing epistemological questions in a distinctively skilful and forceful style. p. f. strawson planted the seed of his Kantian metaphysics in the fertile Wittgensteinian soil of 1950s Oxford. He moved from an early critique of Russell’s philosophical logic to foundational metaphysical questions; this shift in focus offered a model response to the decline of ‘ordinary language’ philosophy in Britain. gilbert ryle, leading light of Oxford philosophy in the middle decades of the twentieth century, hunter of conceptual confusion and category-error. karl popper urged that the mark of a scientific theory is that it is open to falsification, and that the mark of a good society or government or social institution is that it is open to change by the people. pain. A feeling of pain can be either ‘physical’, a *sensation (e.g. toothache), or ‘mental’, an emotion (e.g. the pain of a bereavement). There are two main kinds of philosophical theory of sensations of pain. According to one of them, a sensation is painful in virtue of having a special, intrinsic quality, a quality which happens to be universally disliked for its own sake. According to the other, there is no such intrinsic quality shared by all sensations of pain; what they have in common is simply that they are all disliked for their own sake. Which of these theories is true is of conse- quence for the status of a claim of *hedonism, namely that pain and only pain is or should be shunned for its own sake. i.s.p. *pleasure; happiness. R. Trigg, Pain and Emotion (Oxford, 1970). Paine, Thomas (1737–1809). Born in Thetford, Norfolk, the son of a Quaker farmer, he died in New York after an adventurous career on both sides of the Atlantic. Arriving on American shores in 1774, he put his talents as a pamph- leteer at the service of the rebellious colonists, notably in his Common Sense (1776). Back in England when the French Revolution broke out, he immediately came to its defence in his most influential work, The Rights of Man (1791–2), penned as a reply to the conservative attack on the ideology of the Revolution by Edmund Burke. In part ii of that book, Paine defended a then novel view: among the *natural rights governments must respect are welfare rights of all citizens to education, old-age pensions, and the like. In The Age of Reason (1794–95), enormously popular in its day, he gave a spirited defence of deistic anti- clericalism unmarked, however, by any novel philosophical arguments. His radical ideas for social, political, and economic reform were most fully developed in his last major work, Agrarian Justice (1797). h.a.b. *deism; justice. A. J. Ayer, Thomas Paine (Chicago, 1988). panpsychism. A doctrine about the nature of spatio- temporal reality. It asserts that each spatio-temporal thing has a mental or ‘inner’ aspect. Few panpsychists would be happy with a characterization of their view as that all things have minds, even sticks and stones. Instead, they want to say that there may be varying degrees in which things have inner *subjective or quasi-conscious aspects, some very unlike what we experience as consciousness. A full-blown mind would only be possessed by things approaching the complexity of human beings. On the other hand, it is difficult to characterize precisely to what extent all spatio-temporal things are supposed to have an inner ‘mental’ aspect. Most of those who espouse this doctrine feel impelled to do so because they do not see how the mental can be caused by, or composed from, non- mental things. p.j.p.n. *pantheism. T. Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge, 1978), ch. 13. B. Spinoza, Ethics, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, i, ed. and tr. E. Curley (Princeton, NJ, 1988). pantheism. First used by John Toland in 1705, the term ‘pantheist’ designates one who holds both that everything there is constitutes a unity and that this unity is divine. Pantheists thus deny the radical distinction between God and creatures drawn in monotheistic religions. A familiar philosophical example of pantheism is Spinoza’s doctrine that there is only one *substance and it is divine; he describes this substance as Deus sive natura (God or nature). Pantheism is distinguished from *panpsychism by the fact that panpsychists, who maintain that everything is psychic in nature, need not also hold that everything is divine. p.l.q. O. L. Reiser, Nature, Man and God: A Synthesis of Pantheism and Scientific Humanism (Pittsburgh, 1951). Papineau, David (1947– ). English philosopher, currently Professor of Philosophy of Science at King’s College Lon- don. Papineau has worked in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophies of science, mind, and mathematics. His overall stance is vigorously realist and physicalist in metaphysics, and reliabilist in epistemology. He is one of the originators of the teleological theory of mental *repre- sentation, a solution to the problem of *intentionality which derives the intentional content of our beliefs from the conditions under which actions based on these beliefs and certain desires will succeed in satisfying those desires. Since ‘satisfying’ desires amounts to making their P contents true, the theory needs to explain how desires get their contents. Papineau explains the contents of basic desires in terms of the biological functions with which natural selection has endowed them. t.c. *science, problems of the philosophy of. D. Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism (Oxford, 1993). —— Thinking about Consciousness (Oxford, 2002). paradigm, scientific: see Kuhn. paradigm case argument. A type of argument common in the heyday of *linguistic philosophy, with its emphasis on actual linguistic usage. Philosophers have long dis- puted over whether there are such things as, say, free will or a good inductive argument. The paradigm case argument claims that if the expressions ‘free will’ and ‘good inductive argument’ are standardly applied in some situations and rejected in others, then the former must repre- sent genuine cases of free will etc., or the expressions could not have the meanings they do have. It can, however, be doubted whether this proves the existence of free will etc. in any but a trivial sense. The argument is akin to, but weaker than, *transcendental arguments, which appeal not to how we actually do speak but to how we must if we are to speak at all, either in general or on some given subject-matter. a.r.l. R. J. Richman, ‘On the Argument of the Paradigm Case’, Aus- tralasian Journal of Philosophy (1961), discussed by C. J. F. Williams (ibid.) and Richman (ibid. 1962). paradox of analysis. An ambition of much twentieth- century analytic philosophy was to give the correct analysis of certain terms, concepts, or propositions. Yet, as G. E. Moore pointed out, if an analysis is correct, the analysans must state no more or less than the analysandum. Hence analysis, if successful, is trivial, and if unsuccessful, is false. Moore’s paradox recalls a question tackled by Plato (in Meno) and Aristotle (in the Posterior Analytics): whether— and by what means—we can ever know new things. Paul Feyerabend argued that the paradox of analysis showed that philosophy cannot be analytic and scientific at the same time. a.bre. J. King, ‘What is Philosophical Analysis?’, Philosophical Studies, 90 (1998). paradoxes. There are many separate entries in this work for this or that ‘paradox’. Is there a common feature marked by this term? Part of any such feature would be the idea of conflict. One interpretation of ‘paradox’ is ‘statement conflicting with received opinion’. Thus one of the Socratic paradoxes is the remark that no one ever knowingly does wrong, which is inconsistent with the popular opinion that people often do things they know they shouldn’t. Here the ‘paradox’ represents a philosophically serious challenge to the received opinion. A different use of ‘paradox’ is also marked by *‘antinomy’, which applies not to a statement which conflicts, but to the conflict itself, when it is a conflict between what are (or have been) regarded as fundamental truths. For example, Kant maintains that an antinomy arises between basic principles involved in reasoning about space and time. From these principles, a good argument can be given for the conclusion that the world must be finite in space and time, but the principles also allow an equally good argument that the world cannot be finite, but must be infinite. ‘Antinomy’ marks a different feature of a case from the first use of ‘paradox’, but ‘paradox’ is often given this latter use as well. It is common to find one philosopher calling a case a paradox and another calling the same case an antinomy. In so far as it is a received opinion that given principles do not conflict, then the report that they do conflict will be contrary to that opinion and paradoxical in the first sense. But that does not reduce this second use to the first. They mark different features. A third use of ‘paradox’ is to mark conflict in criteria for classification. A phenomenon may be called paradoxical when it resists classification not because there is insuffi- cient information about it, but because the information brings out conflicts in the criteria for classification which may have been previously unnoticed. Thus ‘paradoxical sleep’ (REM sleep) has features once thought distinctive of a waking state and other features supposed distinctive of a sleeping state. The paradoxes of quantum physics involve light phenomena exhibiting both wave characteristics and particle characteristics. If criteria are regarded as fundamental principles, this interpretation might be reduced to the ‘antinomy’ reading. But the feature of involving a classification problem is worth keeping track of. Use of the term ‘paradox’ may leave unclear just what is being called paradoxical and what is meant by so calling it. This is not merely because of unclarity about which of the three foregoing meanings of the term is intended. There may be disagreement about what is in conflict. For example, it is sometimes said that Kant’s antinomy calls for a rejection of the law of excluded middle: the world is neither finite nor not-finite (infinite). Others will argue that it is quite unnecessary to answer in this way. Kant’s idea was that there is no world as a completed whole. This could be expressed by saying that both the claim that the complete world is finite and the claim that the complete world is non-finite are false because there is no such world. That is perfectly compatible with the law that for every propos- ition whatever, either it or its negation must be true. The negation of ‘The world as a complete whole is finite’ is not ‘The world as a complete whole is not finite’, but rather, ‘Either there is no such thing as the world as a complete whole or there is but it is not finite’. Another alternative would be to question the quality of either or both of Kant’s arguments for the two sides of his antinomy, without questioning general logical principles. Here we have a disagreement over just which fundamental laws are in conflict in the sense of constituting an inconsistent group. Of course, whenever any group of claims is in conflict, adding any additional claims will give 678 Papineau, David a larger group which is still in conflict. ‘P and not-P’ is a group in conflict, and adding any other claim, Q, gives us ‘P and not-P and Q’, which is also in conflict. But it may be that Q is not to blame for the conflict—not a genuine party to the conflict belonging under the heading of conflictant. A logical-revisionist side wants to put in the law of excluded middle as a conflictant in Kant’s antinomy and thereby consider its rejection as a way out of the conflict. A logical-traditionist side will refuse to consider that a possibility and identify other conflictants which may have been unnoticed. They will hold that in any case of logical conflict, it is confused to blame logical laws, since they are essential to the idea of logical conflict. Without at least an intuitive grasp of logical laws it would be impossible to recognize the existence of any logical conflict. They are necessary truths indispensable in good reasoning which are above the conflicts they enable us to identify. The logical revisionists may respond that it is possible to make some changes in logic while retaining the basis for classifying some groups of claims as logically consistent or inconsistent. They can point to many honourable candidates for ‘alternative logics’. It is important to ask, however, whether these candidates are presented as universally applicable criteria of conflict which are themselves beyond conflict. This is not to suggest that it is acceptable to presume that there are such criteria and ignore the view that every claim whatever is revisable, that no claim is beyond conflict. But the significance of attribu- tions of ‘paradox’ or ‘antinomy’ often depends on how the idea of ‘conflict’ implicit in these terms is itself understood. This may be illustrated by considering one of the most famous philosophical paradoxes, the *liar paradox. What might be called a ‘version’ involves the sentence A: The sentence A is not true. A good candidate for a fundamental principle about truth is the principle that a sentence is true if and only if what it says to be the case is in fact the case. (And that means ‘all of what it says’.‘2 +2=4 & 2+2=5’ does not qualify as true just because it says correctly that 2 + 2 = 4.) Suppose then, that we assume that what the sentence A says to be the case, all of what it says, is correctly reported as the claim that A is not true. This claim is true if A is not true, and not true if A is true. That entails that A is true if and only if A is not true, which is a contradiction. Now, what is the paradox? What should be identified as conflictants in this case? The logical traditionist will treat classical logical principles as immune from blame for the trouble. So just what are the conflictants? One answer compatible with the traditionist approach is as follows: It is natural and common to assume that what the sentence A says can be correctly reported simply by quoting the sentence, either directly or indirectly. The claim that this assumption is false thus conflicts with a received opinion and is in that sense paradoxical—but it happens to be the truth of the matter none the less. The assumption to the contrary, that all of what A says is just that the sentence A is not true, leads to a contradiction by traditional logical rules. This has not been the most popular response to the ‘paradox’. It is far commoner to respond in a revisionist way. But then it is appropriate to ask: What is to be identified as the paradox? An early propounder of the liar paradox, Eubulides of Megara, did actually present his version as an assertion— ‘I am lying’. But was that a statement contrary to received opinion? His intention was to discredit rationalism by showing that its basic standards of reasoning themselves lead to what they reject—inconsistency. The derived contradiction may be contrary to reason, but it is also derived according to reason. It is not Eubulides’ assertion, or the sentence A, which conflicts with respectable opinion. Rather, it is attempts to determine the truth-value of these sentences which pro- voke conflicting claims. In so far as we can derive a contradiction from an ‘unquestionable recognition’ of what A says along with classical logical rules we have a conflict which is a candidate for ‘antinomy’. The commonest contemporary responses to this problem take it in this way, as an antinomy calling for restrictions on classical logical principles. The most popular restriction holds that there is no such thing as truth simpliciter—only truth at a level, where to say that a claim is not true-level-n is to make a claim of level n +1 to which ‘true-level-n’ cannot be meaningfully applied. This cannot be formulated in unrestricted natural language without undoing its purpose. B: ‘The sentence B is not true at any level’ will raise trouble unless some restriction is placed on what we are allowed to say. So it is denied that we can talk meaningfully about ‘truth-at- some-level-or-other’. These denials of meaning are quite implausible. If ‘truth simpliciter’ is meaningless then ‘There is no such thing as truth simpliciter’ should also be meaningless, just as ‘There is no blah-blah-blah’ is meaningless. The fact that the former is not meaningless sug- gests that it is not true. The ‘levels’ response requires denying that there even were general principles about truth that led to inconsistency. The ‘universal laws’ would not be false or conflicting but rather ‘blah-blah’—and ‘blah-blah’ is not a candidate for logical conflict. This criticism could be parried by taking a nominalistic approach and saying not that there is no truth simpliciter but rather that the traditional use of the word ‘true’ without implicit or explicit levels tended to lead its users into inconsistencies. The ‘universal laws’ would then be certain sentences of a sort found to be no longer useful, but still easily distinguishable from ‘blah-blah’. However, this does not satisfactorily explain why the alleged inconsistencies of plain ‘true’ ought to be avoided. The traditional answer would be that it is absolutely impossible, universally impossible, in all possible lan- guages, for inconsistencies to be true. This can’t be allowed on this ‘nominalist’ line any more than it could on the previous one. The universality of the logical criteria are given up on this approach, and that deprives the ‘inconsistencies’ of their problematic significance. A more recent approach to the liar paradox treats criteria for truth or falsity as sequential. The ruling that the paradox is true satisfies a criterion for ruling it false; that paradoxes 679 . the length of a table’ may be said to be the number of times a measuring-rod needs to be laid end to end on the table, going from one end of it to the other. If there is more than one way to. self-assurance the Other opens the question of ethics. The priority of the Other becomes equivalent to the primacy of ethics over ontology. Questions have been raised about this conception of the Other the philosophy of the Other was freed from the epistemological problematic. In Totality and Infinity Levinas charged previous philosophy, including that of Husserl, with reducing the Other to

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