One important issue about the performing arts con- cerns the matter of the authenticity of performances, usu- ally construed as something more than mere correctness, and covering matters such as conformity to the intentions of artists, to antecedent performing traditions, or to the historical contexts of creation of works. A second import- ant issue concerns the role of interpretation in perform- ance, and what the relationship is between such performative interpretation and the more straightforward sort of interpretation—critical interpretation—involved in criticism. j.lev. Stephen Davies, Musical Works and Performances (Oxford, 2001). Peter Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Per- formance (Ithaca, NY, 1995). Paul Thom, For an Audience: A Philosophy of the Performing Arts (Philadelphia, 1993). Peripatetics. This is the name given, first, to philosophers who worked in the school founded by Aristotle (the Lyceum or Peripatos), and, secondly, to later philosophers who commented on and interpreted his writings. Notable members of the first group are Theophrastus (371–287) and Strato (c.335–270), as well as Eudemus and Aristoxenus; of the second, Aristocles of Messene, Aspasius (second century ad), and above all Alexander of Aphrodisias (early third century ad). Peripatetics were characteristically scientists or scholars, rather than philosophers. That stance reflects Aristotle’s division of inquiry into autonomous specialisms for which he claims to have com- pleted, in main outline, the philosophical foundations. But it ignores the tentative and dialectical character of the philosophical originator of the Peripatos. j.d.g.e. There is no satisfactory study of the Peripatetics in English; but for Theophrastus, see W. W. Fortenbaugh et al., Theophrastus of Eresus, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1992). perlocutions: see linguistic acts. Perry, Ralph Barton (1876–1957), a leading figure in the movement of American *New Realism and the editor of its manifesto (1912). Perry occupied the most extreme position among his fellow realists—he was purest of the pure. He agreed with James’s neutral monism and nega- tive answer to the question ‘Does consciousness exist?’, and tried to explain perception without duplicating objects, some of whose configurations were ‘physical’ and others were what we ordinarily take to be ‘psychical’. In General Theory of Value (1926), written after the steam had gone out of New Realism, he gave a naturalistic account of values, defining value as ‘any object of any interest’. By virtue of his long tenure at Harvard, along with his col- league C. I. Lewis, he did much to professionalize philo- sophical teaching and research. His biography of William James won the Pulitzer Prize in 1936. l.w.b. Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy (New Haven, Conn., 1977), pts. 3 and 4. R. B. Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies (New York, 1912). persecution of philosophers. Even the most unworldly of intellectual disciplines has never been able to divorce itself entirely from the worldly conflict which determines the course of human history. Philosophy was born into a society dominated by revolution and counter-revolution, and the earliest of its great exponents, Socrates, was exe- cuted because his teachings, it was said, corrupted the young. Modern philosophy originated in an era no less revolutionary, and some of its leading exponents were exposed to similar dangers. Unused to having their own ideas taken seriously, philosophers today may be surprised to learn that the Par- liament of the time regarded the doctrines of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) as a probable cause of the Great Fire of 1666. Safely dead, Hobbes is the greatest of British philosophers; alive and kicking, he was dangerous to know, and those in charge of the universities were not dis- tracted by the notion of academic freedom from persecut- ing anyone who sympathized with his ‘lewd, scandalous and immoral doctrine’. In 1668 Daniel Scargill was deprived of a fellowship at Corpus Christi College and expelled from Cambridge for being ‘an Hobbist and an Atheist’. Scargill was promised in 1669 that he could return if he delivered a public recantation: two drafts of this were rejected; in the third, the unfortunate Scargill confessed to having been an agent of the Devil, but he was never restored to his fellowship and was obliged to live in extreme poverty. The hostility of more orthodox thinkers was aroused above all by the intellectual ruthlessness with which Hobbes insisted that all divine authority must reflect earthly power. Nothing is more binding than the word of God: this Hobbes would be the first to allow. But, he argued, the word of God, like all words, may be inter- preted in rival ways. What counts as an authoritative interpretation must therefore depend on the power of those capable of enforcing it. Benedict de Spinoza (1634–77) shared with Hobbes the honour of being regarded by all respectable persons with the horror of ‘atheism’ which is matched by the horror of ‘communism’ in the twentieth century. Educated in the rabbinical tradition, Spinoza broke with Judaism: he was formally anathematized in 1656, and it is reliably reported that an attempt was made on his life. Like Socrates, he took no payment from his pupils: ‘mischief’, said one of his biographers, ‘could be had from him for nothing’. Like Hobbes, he repudiated the conventional conception of God and subjected the authority of Scripture to critical scrutiny. His Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) was pro- hibited by the authorities and placed on the Index of the Catholic Church. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) challenged conventional wisdom throughout his long life. His opposition to the First World War led to imprisonment and his being deprived of his lectureship at Trinity College, Cambridge. A decisive influence on the campaign against nuclear weapons in the 1960s, and an advocate of civil disobedi- ence, he was also—with Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80)—a 690 performing arts leading light in the International War Crimes Tribunal investigating American atrocities in Vietnam. His book Marriage and Morals (1929) was cited as evidence of his depravity when he was deprived of the professorship he had been offered at the City College of New York in 1940. La Guardia, the Mayor of New York, described Russell as ‘an ape of genius, the devil’s minister of men’. An applica- tion was made to the State Supreme Court to compel the Board of Education to rescind the appointment. Russell, the Court was told, should be regarded ‘not a philosopher in the accepted meaning of the word’ but as someone who ‘by cunning contrivances, tricks and devices and by mere quibbling . . . puts forth fallacious arguments and argu- ments that are not supported by sound reasoning’, an advocate of everything ‘lecherous, libidinous, lustful, ven- erous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow- minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fibre’. Russell, it was added, also ‘winks at homosexuality’. It would honour the profession if it could be said only that philosophers have been persecuted; but the truth is that, if philosophers have been among the hunted, they have also been among the hunters. Hobbes’s contempor- ary Ralph Cudworth was a philosopher too, but he was also Master of Corpus Christi: when Scargill was expelled, Cudworth’s name was on the expulsion order. Spinoza’s contemporary Leibniz, a great philosopher in his own right, must surely have recognized Spinoza’s greatness; but he pretended otherwise. Russell’s contemporary J. M. E. McTaggart thought that ‘academic freedom is very precious and fragile’, but he also argued for Russell’s removal from Trinity: ‘it is quite different’, McTaggart said, ‘when he had done something the law pronounced to be a crime’. m.c. c.w. R. W. Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell (London, 1975). S. I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan (Cambridge, 1962). persistence through time. That something continues to exist from one moment to the next has been seen by some philosophers as requiring explanation. Each point in *time, they say, is ‘logically independent’: from the fact that any- thing exists at a particular time, it does not follow that it must exist at some later time. Hence, if an object persists through time, this must have some cause. Descartes and Spinoza both hold, though in significantly different ways, that God is the cause, the former presenting this as a proof of God’s existence. Leibniz relies on the same consider- ations to argue that all true propositions are analytic: if you are the same individual you used to be, he says, this can only be because your existence then and now are both essential to your nature. Hume, by contrast, argues that the very notion of an object persisting through time is a ‘fiction’ derived from our propensity to run into one a sequence of experiences that are essentially distinct. c.w. Descartes, Third Meditation. Spinoza, Ethics, First Part, prop. XXIV. Leibniz, Philosophical Writings, ed. Parkinson (London, 1973). Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, book i, sect. ii. person-affecting principles. Some moral principles evalu- ate choices in what Parfit calls ‘person-affecting terms’, which appeal to a choice’s effects upon the interests of particular individuals. One choice is morally worse than another in these terms only if it is worse for at least some specific individual, who would have fared better given the other choice. According to Parfit, person-affecting prin- ciples at best are only part of a plausible moral theory since they fail to explain why certain choices which affect the membership, as well as interests, of *future generations are wrong. For example, if a choice between risky and safe energy policies determines both whether a catastrophe occurs and which distinct set of individuals (all with lives worth living) exists, in the distant future, then the former cannot be criticized in person-affecting terms, since there is no affected individual who would have fared better had the latter been chosen. a.d.w. *population. D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), pt. 4. personal identity. The way philosophers refer to facts about *persons which are expressed in identity judge- ments such as ‘The person over there now is identical to the person who was there yesterday’, the truth of which is a consequence of the fact that persons remain in existence over time. The problem is to say in an informative way what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for this kind of fact. These conditions are called criteria of identity for persons. A second related problem, raised by Parfit, is what importance facts about such identities should have in our evaluative thought. No consensus on the first problem has emerged. What has proved difficult is finding a balance between the intu- itions that are generated by imaginary cases, for example, brain transplants, which indicate that psychological conti- nuities are crucial, and, by contrast, our actual practices of tracing people plus a sense of our identity as concrete sub- stances, which seem to link us to something substantial. Theories can be classified in various ways; one division is between those which state the criteria in psychological terms and those which do not; another, regarded as important by Parfit, is between theories which view per- sonal identity as reducible to other continuities and those which do not; a third division is between theories which tie the person to a continuing substance, say the body, brain, or soul, and those which do not. Locke’s influential theory is of the latter sort. He pro- posed that persons are essentially capable of self- consciousness. Their identity should be analysed in terms of *consciousness, which is standardly interpreted as the proposal that a person is identical with whoever’s exploits they remember as their own—the memory criterion. His negative thesis is that this consciousness is not necessarily tied to a body or soul. The neo-Lockean research strategy defends a modified Lockean view. To avoid possible circularities in the use of the concept of memory they have constructed personal identity 691 psychological concepts, which are explicitly defined with- out using the concept of personal identity. The psycho- logical continuities required are weakened. The structure of the theory is more complex to deal with problems of fission. The major alternative approach to this tradition requires the persistence of some substantial item for the person to survive. A Cartesian view is that we have non- material souls and survive so long as the particular soul does. More popular, though, are accounts according to which the continuant required must be physical. One sug- gestion, defended by Williams, is that the person is tied to the body. This fits our treatment of actual cases, but gen- erates a counter-intuitive verdict when we consider imagin- ary ones. A related theory, developed by Wiggins, is that it is a mistake to allow, as Lockeans do, any distinction between the person and the animal. Personal identity is, on this view, a case of animal identity. An alternative physicalist account claims that a person is tied to that (physical) item which sustains the person’s basic psychological capacities, supposedly the brain. This fits certain intuitions better than bodily theories, but has difficulty explaining exactly why psychological continu- ities grounded in more radically non-standard ways are not also enough for the person to survive. The difficulty of constructing a defensible theory has led to a reconsideration of the methods philosophers have employed, which has been encouraged as well by Parfit’s discussion of whether personal identity matters. He argues, in various ways, that it does not, one being that brain-splitting plus transplants would give what mat- ters to us but, because it generates two candidates, does not preserve the original person. So, he concludes, identity does not matter. Many are unhappy with Parfit’s conclusion, and also wish to reconsider the method employed to reach it. These methodological inquiries have led to no agree- ment, and all of the described theories are under active development. p.f.s. *animalism; reductionism, psychological, in personal identity. R. Martin and J. Barresi (eds.), Personal Identity (Oxford, 2002). H. Noonan, Personal Identity (London, 1989). D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), esp. pt. 3. J. Perry, Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self (Indianapolis, 2002). S. Shoemaker and R. Swinburne, Personal Identity (London, 1984). P. F. Snowdon, ‘Persons, Animals, and Ourselves’, in C. Gill (ed.), The Person and the Human Mind (Oxford, 1990). personalism. As a label applied primarily to the philoso- phy of the French thinker Emmanuel Mounier (1905–50), a Christian version of existentialism stressing communion on the basis of shared values, with the person, as distinct from the political individual, as the locus of a ‘unique voca- tion’ directed towards fellowship. Other philosophers who have made personhood a fundamental concept include the German philosopher Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817–81), the American idealists Josiah Royce (1855–1916) and Edgar Sheffield Brightman (1884–1953), and the Scottish humanist, John Macmurray (1891–1976). Common to these thinkers is the view that the finite indi- vidual is somehow grounded in and seeks its fulfilment in an infinite spirit, or God, understood as personal, though Macmurray opposed idealism and considered ‘God’ mainly a negative concept given positive content only in actual relations among persons. Personalism in these wider senses has affinities with the process theism of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) and Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000). An early exponent was the Nor- wegian philosopher Niels Treschow (1751–1833). a.h. E. S. Brightman, Person and Reality (New York, 1958). J. Macmurray, Persons in Relation (London, 1961; repr. Amherst, NY, 1999). E. Mounier, Le Personnalisme (Paris, 1949). persons. On a purely functional view, possession of a range of specific psychological capacities is both necessary and sufficient for being a person. The characteristics in question are determinable *a priori by reference to our concept of a person. Locke’s definition of a person as ‘a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places’ is an example of a functional definition. Given this approach, there is no reason in prin- ciple why an artefact or immaterial soul should not count as a person, as long as the functional conditions are met. On the other hand, a brain-damaged human being who lacks the relevant capacities will fail to count as a person. Descartes claimed that a person is a compound of body and soul. It has been objected that talk of immaterial souls is illegitimate because of difficulties in specifying singular- ity and identity conditions for them. Instead, P. F. Straw- son proposes that the concept of a person is ‘primitive’, that is to say, it is of a type of entity such that both predi- cates ascribing states of consciousness and those ascribing corporeal characteristics are equally applicable to a single individual of that single type. The most familiar examples of persons in the Strawson- ian sense are human beings. Some have claimed that only human beings can be persons, or, more modestly, that persons must at least be animals of some sort. According to what David Wiggins calls the animal attribute view of persons, a person is any animal that is such by its kind as to have the biological capacity to enjoy fully an open-ended list of psychological attributes. The list of attributes is to be filled in by reference to the class of actual persons. The animal attribute theory is, in some respects, more restrictive than a purely functional approach. It rules out non-animal persons, and does not even allow that posses- sion of the enumerated psychological attributes is suffi- cient for an individual animal to count as a person; the animal must also be a typical member of its kind. On the other hand, the animal attribute theory is more permis- sive than the purely functional approach to the extent that it does not exclude from the class of persons a brain- damaged human being who has lost the psychological capacities included in the functional definition. 692 personal identity The most serious challenge facing the animal attribute view results from reflection about what the identity of a person consists in. If, as Locke argued, the persistence of the animal with which a person shares her matter is nei- ther necessary nor sufficient for the persistence of the per- son, the person and the animal cannot be identical. For writers influenced by Locke, *personal identity is to be understood as consisting in the obtaining of various forms of psychological continuity or connectedness. This approach may be motivated both by ethical consider- ations and by reflection on puzzle cases. From the fact that the continuities in question are not all or nothing, some have drawn the conclusion that persons have an onto- logical status akin to that of clubs or nations. Another view would be that a person is what underlies her psychological capacities, namely, her brain. In defence of his position, the ‘animalist’ may argue that thought experiment and conceptual analysis are not the best way of theorizing about persons and personal iden- tity. The most reliable point of reference for an under- standing of the nature of persons is what is known about the nature of *human beings, even if such an approach lays itself open to accusations of parochialism. If some of our intuitions about puzzle cases conflict with our best overall theory of persons then we may be entitled to reject those intuitions as deviant. q.c. *animalism. J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford, 1975), ii. xxvii. E. Olson, The Human Animal: Personal Identity without Psychology (Oxford, 1997). D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), pt. 3. P. F. Snowdon, ‘Persons, Animals, and Ourselves’, in C. Gill (ed.), The Person and the Human Mind (Oxford, 1990). P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London, 1959), ch. 3. D. Wiggins, Sameness and Substance Renewed (Cambridge, 2001), ch. 7. perspectivism: see Nietzsche. persuasive definition: see definition. pessimism and optimism. The metaphysical theories that this world is, respectively, the worst and the best of all that are possible. Taken in this literal, cosmic sense—worst- ism and best-ism—the theories are of relatively recent date, at least in Western thought, optimism going back to the eighteenth, pessimism to the nineteenth century. The history of the terms themselves reflect the recent growth of the theories. ‘Optimisme’ came into currency in France towards the middle of the eighteenth century, with the English word ‘optimism’ following somewhat later in the century. From the outset, the term was used to describe Leibniz’s position, particularly as developed in his Théodicée (1710). The first recorded use of the antithetical term ‘pessimism’ is in a 1794 letter of Coleridge. By the 1880s it had also generally established itself as the name of a metaphysical system—that in Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819). Hence there are good historical and etymological grounds for regarding—as I shall here—the metaphysical theories as embodying the primary meanings of the two terms, even though current usage is much vaguer, largely indicating a negative or positive attitude towards things. The two terms are also used more precisely and narrowly to refer to the value of human existence. In this anthropo- logical sense, the Platonic and Artistotelian ideas of human perfectibility are taken to be optimistic; whereas statements of pessimism are to be found in the books of Ecclesiastes and Job as well as in Oedipus at Colonus, where Sophocles writes that ‘Not to be born is the most to be desired; but having seen the light, the next best is to die as soon as possible’. Leibniz’s metaphysical optimism is based on his ration- alistic theology. From the ontological argument, he knows that God, the most perfect being, exists; and such a being must have created the best of all possible worlds; hence this must be that world. Imperfections are explained as necessary for this richest compossible whole—just as shadows are required by a picture to give form to the light and colour. For Schopenhauer, on the other hand, this world is so bad that if it were to become even slightly worse it would collapse into chaos. Any goods and pleasures are required for this compossibly worst whole. Schopenhauer’s pos- ition is based on his metaphysics, although this is often overlooked by those more familiar with his popular essays than his main philosophical work. Whereas Leibniz’s metaphysics is rationalistic, Schopenhauer’s is empirical, based on an inner, immediate experience of our living bodies as will or desire. Hence the real, underlying nature of the world is not a most perfect being; rather it is will, feeding and preying upon itself. Desire is positive, satisfac- tion is the negation or suspension of desire. Hence the world is wrong, both morally and in the preponderance of pain over pleasure. Nor is there any hope that it can be rec- tified, since the fault lies in the substance rather than any accident or form of the world. Schopenhauer develops this thesis by drawing on Kant: the apparent orderliness, goodness, satisfaction in the world derive not from what the world is in itself, but from the structuring required to make it into a perceivable, livable world at all. Schopen- hauer also draws inspiration from Buddhism and Hin- duism, which he regards as essentially pessimistic religions—as opposed to Judaism and Islam, which he takes to be optimistic. Yet at times he seems to recognize that, like Christianity, most major religions contain both optimistic and pessimistic elements: they are more or less pessimistic about this world and more or less optimistic about the next or real world. While pessimism and optimism have never been cen- tral issues in philosophy, pessimism did have some vogue in Germany towards the end of the nineteenth century, chiefly from Eduard von Hartmann’s elaborate Philosophy of the Unconscious (Eng. tr. 1884), which develops Schopen- hauer’s pessimism, while trying to combine it with Hegelian elements. Anglo-American philosophers have pessimism and optimism 693 shown little interest in the debate, apart from Sully’s work (see below) and occasional witty criticism—as, for example, in William James’s ‘German Pessimism’ (1875). What is probably most memorable about Leibnizian optimism is its satirical rebuttal in Voltaire’s Candide (1759). While Schopenhauer’s pessimism has produced no similar satire—which is itself, perhaps, notable—it has inspired the influential reactions of Nietzsche, beginning with his Birth of Tragedy (1872), which largely accepts Schopenhauer’s pessimism, although sublimating it through the ideal of tragic life. Yet in his later writings, Nietzsche is hostile; for while he agrees in general with Schopenhauer’s description of the will, he forcefully opposes his negative, ascetic attitude towards it with a joyous affirmation. Nietzsche’s provocative views on truth can also be seen as a reaction to Schopenhauer. For while Schopenhauer was a pessimist about the world, he was an optimist about knowledge and truth; for it is through knowledge, he holds, that any good is achieved—either in transitory, will-less aesthetic contemplation, or in the insight leading to ascetic renunciation and nirvana, the highest and most lasting good. Nietzsche, in short, reverses this: he is a metaphysical optimist, but an epistemological pessimist, warning of the dangers for life of knowledge or truthfulness. d.ber. *life, the meaning of. A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936). P. Siwek, ‘Pessimism in Philosophy’ and ‘Optimism in Philoso- phy’, in The New Scholasticism (1948). J. Sully, Pessimism: A History and a Criticism (London, 1877). Peter of Spain (c.1205–77). Born in Lisbon he studied at Paris (c.1220–9), taught medicine for several years at Siena, and was later Court physician of Gregory X at Viterbo. He was appointed Archbishop of Braga (1273), Cardinal-Archbishop of Frascati (1273), and was elected Pope John XXI in 1276. His writings cover a wide range of subjects, but he is most famous for the treatise Summule Logicales. It covers practically all the topics then taught under the heading of logic and became one of the great logic textbooks of the Middle Ages. During the two and a half centuries after its publication it was the subject of numerous commentaries. a.bro. Peter of Spain: Tractatus called afterwards Summule Logicales, ed. L. M. de Rijk (Assen, 1972). petitio principii: see begging the question. Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) (1304–74). Italian medieval poet and moral philosopher who revived practical ethics with its emphasis on introspection and experience for the Renaissance, taking as his models the classical Latin essay- ists and letter-writers Cicero and Seneca, as well as the early Christian Augustine. In On his Own Ignorance, Petrarch elaborated a mature critique of contemporary *scholasticism, such as was found especially at the Univer- sity of Padua with its concentration on logical sophisms and philosophy of nature, and its scorn for moral issues. Petrarch preferred a rhetorical approach to ethics, realiz- ing the importance of appealing to the imagination and the emotions in discourse aimed at moving the will. His major moral philosopical work, On Remedies for Fortune, Fair and Foul, a manual of Stoic psychotherapy, aims at tempering and healing disturbed passions. Reason dia- logues with Elation and Hope in one book, and with Pain and Dread (linked to melancholia) in another in order that an inner equilibrium can be attained, the Stoic ‘peace of soul’. l.p. N. Mann, Petrarch (Oxford, 1984). L. Panizza, ‘Petrarch’s De Remediis and Stoic Psychotherapy’, in M. Osler (ed.), Atoms, Pneuma and Tranquillity (Cambridge, 1991). phenomena and noumena. These terms mean literally ‘things that appear’ and ‘things that are thought’. Platonic Ideas and Forms are noumena, and phenomena are things displaying themselves to the senses. In Plato’s metaphor of the divided line (Republic, bk. 6), whatever lies above the dividing-line is noumenal, that which is below it is phenomenal. In Republic 517b the distinction is between that which is revealed to sight and that which is intelligi- ble; at 524c the contrast is between terms cognate with noumena and phenomena. This dichotomy is the most characteristic feature of Plato’s dualism; that noumena and the noumenal world are objects of the highest know- ledge, truths, and values is Plato’s principal legacy to philosophy. Kant deals with this duality in his Inaugural Dissertation (1770), On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intel- ligible World. The intelligible world of noumena is known by pure reason, which gives us knowledge of things as they are. Things in the sensible world (phenomena) are known through our senses and known only as they appear. To know noumena we must abstract from and exclude sensi- ble concepts such as space and time. Kant called the determination of noumena and phe- nomena the ‘noblest enterprise of antiquity’, but in the Critique of Pure Reason he denied that noumena as objects of pure reason are objects of knowledge, since reason gives knowledge only of objects of sensible intuition (phenomena). Noumena ‘in the negative sense’ are objects of which we have no sensible intuition and hence no knowledge at all; these are things-in-themselves. Noumena ‘in the positive sense’ (e.g. the soul and God) are conceived of as objects of intellectual intuition, a mode of knowledge which man does not possess. In neither sense, therefore, can noumena be known. For both Plato and Kant, nevertheless, conceptions of noumena and the intelligible world are foundational for ethical theory. l.w.b. I. Kant, On the Forms and Principles of the Intelligible and Sensible World (1770), in Kant’s Latin Writings, ed. L. W. Beck, 2nd edn. (New York, 1992). —— Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd edn. (1787), A 236/B 295–A 260/B 315. 694 pessimism and optimism phenomenalism. The doctrine that physical objects are reducible to sensory experiences, or that physical object statements can be analysed in terms of phenomenal state- ments describing sensory experience. The main twenti- eth-century defenders of the view, A. J. Ayer and C. I. Lewis, tried, each in his own way, to show how the con- tent of a physical-object statement involves appeal to nothing more than sense-*contents or *sense-data, or any- how sensory *experience. Consider: (1) This snowball is white. (2) There is a white sense-content. Does 1 have an analysis in terms of 2? If so, 1 must entail 2, but it does not. Nor does it help to assume that one is looking at the snow- ball and only at the snowball, or to ignore the experience of everyone else, etc. This last is especially problematic if we wish to construct selves from sense-contents. Let us waive that, however, and consider further the following: (3) The light shining on this is red. The conjunction of 1 and 3 together with assumptions of the sort indicated will actually entail not-2, and hence cannot entail 2. And it is then hard to conceive of any sense-contents whose exist- ence would be entailed by a particular physical fact, even one as simple and observational as that reported by 1, even when combined with assumptions like those above (exclusive of 3). (See R. M. Chisholm, ‘The Problem of Empiricism’.) Moreover, phenomenalists must invoke not only actual but also merely possible phenomena, possible experiences. For a particular grain of sand may never be associated with any actual phenomena, since no one may ever perceive it. There is of course no hope of isolating the single fact of there being a snowball before me by means of the one *conditional that if I were to open my eyes I would have a visual experience of whiteness and roundness. There are ever so many different conditions that in the absence of snow still give rise to the truth of that condi- tional. But perhaps the idea is rather this: if we consider the possible courses of action open to me at the moment and the experiential outcomes conditional upon those courses of action, some such infinite set of conditionals would capture the single fact of there being a snowball before me. If so, we could perhaps say that there being a snowball before me was necessarily equivalent to the joint truth of that set of conditionals. However, the introduction of such possible phenom- ena imports a complication, for the possibilities in ques- tion must be in some sense ‘real’ and not just logical. But real possibility is grounded in actual conditions. And what could function as the ‘base’ or ‘ground’ for the phenom- enalist’s actual conditions relative to which his possible phenomena are to be defined? What can ground such con- ditionals as: I would experience a sense-content of some- thing white if I acted in a certain way? Presumably it would be just me and my properties (whether or not I myself am also to be reduced, as in *neutral monism, or to be left standing as in Berkeley’s subjective *idealism). If so, then the fact that there is a white piece of paper before me has a status relative to me similar to the status of the elas- ticity of a rubber band relative to the rubber band. A major problem for such phenomenalism stems from perceptual relativity: white paper looks white under white light, red under red, etc. Any possible course of experience resulting from a possible course of action will apparently underdetermine our surroundings: it will determine, for example, that there is either white paper under red light or red paper under white light, or the like. For this reason among others, phenomenalism now has few defenders. e.s. *perception; representative theory of perception. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York, 1952). R. M. Chisholm, ‘The Problem of Empiricism’, Journal of Philoso- phy (1948). R. Firth, ‘Radical Empiricism and Perceptual Relativity’, Philo- sophical Review (1950). R. Fumerton, Metaphysical and Epistemological Problems of Percep- tion (Lincoln, Nebr., 1985). C. I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (La Salle, Ill., 1946). phenomenology. One of the most important philosoph- ical movements of the twentieth century. It was founded by Edmund Husserl at the beginning of this century and has had many followers, for example, Moritz Geiger, Alexander Pfaender, Max Scheler, Oscar Becker, up to the present. Quite naturally, it has undergone many changes, refinements, shifts of emphasis, etc. Originally, it was pri- marily a theory of *knowledge. Later on, in the years after 1913, phenomenology developed into a form of *idealism. Phenomenology distinguishes sharply between per- ceptual properties on the one hand, and abstract proper- ties on the other. Consider two white billiard balls, called A and B. The white colour of A, which one can see with one’s eyes, is said to be located in space where A is. The white colour of B, similarly, is taken to be located where B is. Furthermore, it is maintained that the colour of A is not identical with the colour of B, since they are located at two different places. The same shade of colour, according to this analysis, divides into as many ‘colour instances’ of that shade as there are individual things with this colour shade. However, all of these instances are instances of the same colour shade. There exists, therefore, according to phenomenology, also the abstract colour shade of which the instances are instances. Let us call this abstract colour the ‘universal whiteness’. Phenomenology asserts that there is not only a direct perception of instances of white- ness, but also a sort of direct perception of the universal whiteness. This perception is called ‘eidetic intuition’. By means of eidetic intuition we have knowledge of the essential features of the world. Phenomenologists call such universals *essences. An essence can be presented to the mind in its totality in one mental act of intuition. Perceptual objects, however, can never be so presented. According to phenomenolo- gists, we can only perceive aspects of them. This is one of the fundamental differences between essences and certain individual things. What does it mean to perceive merely aspects of, say, one of our billiard-balls? There seem to be phenomenology 695 two notions of an aspect at work. Firstly, we must distin- guish between the colour instance of billiard-ball A, which is a part of A, and the differently coloured sensations which we experience when we look at A. Assume, for example, that A is illuminated from one side, so that half of it lies in the shadow. Even though that billiard-ball is uni- formly coloured, our colour sensation of it is not uni- formly white: one part of it is much darker than the other. And if we were to put on coloured glasses, our colour sen- sation would not be white at all. Now, what phenomen- ologists sometimes seem to have in mind when they speak of perception through aspects is that the property instances of a perceptual object, its colour, its shape, appear to us only through the perspective variations of our colour sensation and the variations of our shape sensations. Secondly, and much more obviously, spatial perceptual objects can only be perceived from a point of view. For example, when we look at billiard-ball A, only one side is turned towards us and we cannot see its back. In this sense, therefore, we can only perceive, from a given point of view, a spatial ‘aspect’ of it. It is clear that this notion of an aspect is quite different from the one mentioned in the last paragraph. According to phenomenology, therefore, our know- ledge of things divides into direct and indirect knowledge, that is, into direct knowledge and knowledge through aspects. Essences (universal properties) are known directly, but perceptual objects are only known through their aspects. However, in addition to perceptual things, there are also mental things and selves. How are they known? *Consciousness, according to phenomenology, is known, like essences, directly. The mental act of seeing a billiard-ball, a desire to be once again in Venice, a remem- brance of strolling down the beach in Manly, all of these so-called mental acts are presented to us without aspects. There is thus a fundamental difference between the objects of the outside perceptual world and the objects of the world of consciousness: the former are never given to us wholly and completely in single mental acts of percep- tion, the latter are fully given to us when we attend to them. But the self, the mental individual from which all mental acts issue, is only presented to us indirectly, like a perceptual object. The realm of individual things thus divides into an ‘immanent’ part, consciousness, and two ‘transcendent’ parts, perceptual objects and the self. This makes consciousness special, because what we truly and directly know is only consciousness. But some phenom- enologists go even further and claim that consciousness has a kind of being quite different from all other things. This claim plays an essential role in *existentialism. So far we have appraised phenomenology as a theory of knowledge. But it is often viewed not as a new philosoph- ical view about old epistemological problems, but as a new method of doing philosophy, and one speaks then of the phenomenological method. Sometimes, one even talks of the science of phenomenology, which is claimed to have its own method and subject-matter. So-called eidetic reflection, reflection on essences and their connections, is of course the heart of phenomen- ology. This reflection requires eidetic reduction. By means of eidetic reduction, we shift our attention from a particular instance of a property to the abstract property (essence) itself. After the shift has taken place, one will ‘see’ the essence directly and in its totality. Furthermore, after eidetic reduction, one also intuits connections among essences. One may intuit, for example, that the essences of ego and of spatial being reveal that the former can perceive the latter only in spatial perspective. Phe- nomenology, from this point of view, inquires into the structures formed by essences. The knowledge gained by a study of the relationships among essences, according to most phenomenologists, is non-empirical. For example, the insight just mentioned that an ego can perceive a spatial being only in perspective is gleaned from a connection between the essence of an ego and the essence of something spatial; it is not inferred by induction from individual cases. Such an inference, for example, would be involved if one concluded from repeated observations of particular whales that all whales are mammals. But phenomenological truths are thought to be not only non-empirical in this sense, but also neces- sary. The inductive law about whales may be proven false, for example, by the discovery of a whale that is not a mam- mal but a fish. No such possibility exists, however, for the phenomenological truth about the connection between the essence of being an ego and the essence of observing spatial things. Since phenomenological truths are thought to be both non-empirical and necessary, they are said to be true a priori. But this is not all there is to the phenomenological method. There is also phenomenological reduction. It seems that there are two sides to phenomenological reduc- tion. Firstly, there is a general prescription to look at things without prejudice, to go to the things themselves, to leave theoretical speculation behind, etc. Secondly, however, there is also a more specific side to phenomenological reduction. It consists, as a first step, in the *‘bracketing of the objective world’. Phenomenologists rely at this point on a thesis which was defended by the Polish philosopher Twardowski, who, like Husserl, was a student of Brentano’s. Twardowski distinguished between an indi- vidual act of presentation, the content of this act, and the object of the act. Assume that one is presented with the bil- liard-ball A. Then there occurs a particular mental act of presentation. This act has a unique content which is a prop- erty of the mental act, and it has, as its object, the billiard- ball A. Twardowski’s thesis is that every act has an object, even those acts which intend things which do not exist. If one hallucinates a big polka-dotted bat, one’s act of seeing has an object, even though this object does not exist. In gen- eral, Twardowski insisted (for example, against Bolzano) that we must distinguish between the question whether a mental act has an object and the question whether its object exists. Some mental acts have objects which do not exist. Phenomenological reduction is then a method of revealing 696 phenomenology the essences of the objects of our mental acts, irrespective of whether these objects exist in reality, even irrespective of whether there really is a non-mental reality. Phenomenological reduction enjoins us to study the objects of our mental acts precisely as they are, and irre- spective of their existence. But for some phenomenolo- gists this is only the first step. They adhere to the much more radical prescription that we must eventually turn away from the ‘outside world’ and concentrate exclu- sively on consciousness. In one of Husserl’s later versions of the nature of phenomenology, this exclusive concen- tration on consciousness sets phenomenology apart from the natural sciences. Phenomenology thus has its own method, reflection on the essences of mental acts, and it has its own subject-matter, consciousness. Phenomen- ology, according to this conception, is the study of the essence of consciousness. The idealistic tenor of this pos- ition is obvious. r.g. For Husserl’s development of phenomenology see his Ideas: Gen- eral Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, tr. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London, 1931); also his ‘Phenomenology’, tr. C. V. Solomon, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th edn. (Chicago, 1927), and Cartesian Meditations, tr. Dorian Cairns (The Hague, 1960). For a descrip- tion of the phenomenological movement see Herbert Spiegel- berg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1960). For a general introduction, see D. Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London, 2000), and accompanying anthology: D. Moran and T. Mooney (eds.), The Phenomenology Reader (London, 2002). Philo (c.20 bc–c.ad 50). Called Philo Judaeus or Philo of Alexandria. Foremost Jewish philosopher of the Hellenis- tic age, a leader of Alexandrian Jewry, who defended his co-religionists in an embassy to Caligula and in sophisti- cated apologetics. Philo’s thoughtful, cosmopolitan, often allegorical Greek commentaries on the Septuagint Bible synthesize Platonic, Stoic, and Jewish values and ideas, laying a foundation for Christian, and later Muslim and Jewish, rational theologians—although the impact on Jews and Muslims was largely indirect. Philo’s idea that the Logos, the word or wisdom of God, mediates God’s absoluteness to creation by articulating divine wisdom in nature and in human intelligence, and his conception of philosophy as the handmaid (ancilla) of theology, were vital to the medieval synthesis. Cast, seemingly, in a sub- ordinate role, philosophy would shape all three monothe- istic cultures. l.e.g. Philo, Works, ed. and tr. F. H. Colson, 10 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1929–53), with 2 suppl. vols. of Ralph Marcus’s Eng. renderings of works preserved in Armon- ian translation. H. A. Wolfson, Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Cambridge, Mass., 1962). Philo (the Dialectician) (Greek, 4th–3rd century bc). By contrast to the *Master Argument, Philo maintained that a predicate’s ‘bare suitability to a subject’ was enough to make something capable of happening. This, he pointed out, would mean that things were capable of happening, even though they were ‘necessarily prevented by external circumstances’; thus a log, he held, would still be capable of burning, even though it was in mid-Atlantic. Philo also invented *material implication: one proposition implies another, he held, when and only when either the first proposition is false or the second proposition is true; in particular, he held that the *conditional ‘If it is day, it is night’ is true, and that the argument ‘It is day; so it is night’ is valid, throughout the night but never in daytime. n.c.d. Gabriele Giannantoni (ed.), Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae (Naples, 1990), i. 414–37 (= Elenchos, vol. xviii*). Philoponus, John (c.490–570s). From Alexandria, Philo- ponus opposed Aristotle’s science, defending the Christ- ian doctrine that the universe had a beginning. He argued thus: without a beginning, the universe must already have endured an infinite number of years; but then how could it be true that, by the end of next year, the universe would have endured a greater number of years? For how could infinity be added to? Philoponus also attacked Aristotle’s dynamics, denying (as later did Galileo) that velocity in a vacuum need be infinite. He also denied that a thrown javelin continued to move because propelled onwards by the air behind it—if so why not propel javelins by bel- lows?—suggesting instead that a force or impetus was imparted to the javelin by its thrower. t.p. R. Sorabji (ed.), Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science (London, 1987). philosophe. A French word now domesticated into Eng- lish, denoting any member of a very diverse though loosely associated group of scientists, writers, statesmen, and prac- tical ‘men of affairs’ whose works and activities constituted the eighteenth-century *Enlightenment movement in Europe and America (e.g. Voltaire, Hume, Franklin, Buf- fon, and Diderot). The philosophes were bound together as a group by their vigorous support of the developing natural sciences, by their insistent (and frequently courageous) challenges to the pervasive influence of outdated trad- itions, superstition, and prejudice, and by their common desire to facilitate the growth and spread of more liberal and humane political institutions. All of these concerns, in the philosophes’ view, were only different sides of a single intellectual mission: to advance the cause of human reason, to perfect its methods, and extend their application across an ever widening range of pursuits. p.f.j. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, i: The Rise of Mod- ern Paganism (New York, 1977). philosopher-king. One of the rulers of the ideal state in Plato’s Republic. (Plato himself does not use the term, referring to the rulers as ‘Guards’ (phulakes).) The basic principle of the organization of the ideal state is that gov- ernment should be in the hands of those who, in virtue of their knowledge of the Good, are uniquely able to order the state for the good of its citizens. The central books of the Republic are devoted to an account of the educational philosopher-king 697 system (largely mathematical, but culminating in meta- physics) which is to lead to knowledge of the Good. c.c.w.t. C. D. C. Reeve, Philosopher-Kings (Princeton, NJ, 1988). philosopher may preach. The satirist may laugh, the philosopher may preach, but Reason herself will respect the prejudices and habits which have been consecrated by the experience of mankind. (Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ch.1) The historian Gibbon was perhaps influenced by Hume, who professed himself unable, despite his scepticism, to avoid the ‘current of nature’ ineluctably sweeping him into belief in the very things he professed to doubt, such as the *external world. But Hume gave this thought an add- itional twist. It is not just that habit and experience ‘con- spire’ to make us see everything in certain ways, but that reason itself is ‘nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct’ arising from them. j.o’g. philosophers, persecution of: see persecution of philoso- phers. philosophers and God: see God and the philosophers. philosopher’s stone. A conjectural and, in fact, imaginary substance capable of transmuting base metals into gold. Its discovery and preparation was the fruitless task of alchemists from early China and India, by way of medieval Arabs, down to various Faust-like figures of the Renais- sance such as Paracelsus. It was a solid variant of the liquid elixir of life. The alchemists’ pursuit of it led to the acquisi- tion of much genuine chemical knowledge and, indeed, to the foundation of chemistry as a science. a.q. philosophical anthropology: see anthropology, philo- sophical. philosophical dictionaries and encyclopaedias: see dic- tionaries and encyclopaedias of philosophy. philosophical inquiry: premisses and first principles. There is an aspect of philosophy that is pervasive enough to be sometimes used to define it: the criticism of assump- tions. Considering various ways of arriving at or approxi- mating to knowledge, Plato places at the top ‘dialectic’. It seems to be what *philosophy essentially consists of, and its nature is explained by contrasting it with mathematics, in which unargued and unexamined assumptions are taken for granted. Rational thinking without assumptions is, however, an inconsistent notion. *Reasoning is move- ment from an accepted or assumed belief to some other belief. Even if the premiss is merely assumed and not accepted, supposed, as the saying is, for the sake of argu- ment, some rules of inference (and very often some sup- pressed premisses as well) are required to provide the conclusion drawn. A certain amount of philosophy has been presented in an explicitly deductive form, with axiomatic premisses set out at the start as in the fascinating model of Euclid’s geometry. Spinoza gave his great work Ethics the subtitle Demonstrated in a Geometrical Manner. His axioms turn out to be quite numerous; there are seven for the first book, five for the second, and comparable handfuls for the other three, supported in each case by definitions. Spinoza did not think that any philosophy set out in this way, even if all the inferences in it were valid, was on that account cor- rect. He produced a version of Descartes’s system in this rigorous form but thought it in many respects mistaken. The axioms had to be true, and that meant, since they could not be inferred, that they had to be self-evident. It is a general characteristic of rationalist philosophers to argue in this way, for example of Descartes and Leibniz and, in our century, of McTaggart. Descartes presents ‘I think, therefore I exist’ as a kind of ultimate premiss, but does argue for it, assuming that ‘I think’ entails ‘I exist’ and asserting that the denial of ‘I think’ is self-refuting. He then goes on to conclude that, since his premiss has the self- certifying property of being ‘clear and distinct’, any other belief with that certifying property is also known for cer- tain to be true, a principle used to authorize a number of substantial propositions. McTaggart claims to deduce his entire philosophy from the axioms that something exists and an obscure ‘principle of determining correspondence’. Rationalist philosophers commonly proceed, at least in the first stages of their work, by way of indirect proof or reductio ad absurdum, in which a proposition is established by inferring a contradiction from its negation. If that is to work it must be assumed that the inference involved is val- idated by a true logical law and that a contradiction is neces- sarily false. The thesis about contradictions is not and the relevant logical laws need not be things anyone would be likely to question. But full-blooded deductive metaphysicians of this kind are rare; a rationalist need not be a rationalist through and through. On the other hand, the minimization of assump- tions is also to be found among empiricists, particularly if they are mathematically trained and inspired. Russell pro- posed, and sketched, the achievement of a ‘minimum vocabulary’ for the description of the world by definitional reduction, and that project was realized in Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World, in which the main elements of the whole apparatus of description are defined in terms of items of sense-experience and the relation of recollected similar- ity. But most empiricists follow a less arduous path. The absolute first principle of *rationalism would seem to be: whatever it would be a contradiction to deny is neces- sarily true. Empiricists would not deny that, but would maintain that while it determines the form of our repre- sentation of the world, it implies nothing about what the world is in fact like. Yet they too have, and give prom- inence to, large basic principles. Locke, Hume, and Mill hold that all, or most, substantial items of knowledge (or justified belief) derive their title to acceptance from sense-experience (or introspection). That 698 philosopher-king seems broadly correct, but is it really self-evident? The claims of alleged moral, aesthetic, and religious experience have to be dealt with as do those of such substantial, but apparently unempirical, generalities as that every quality inheres in a substance, every event is part of the history of an object, and every event has a cause. The classical Empiricists were, in fact, committed by their conception of the nature of philosophy as an empir- ical study of the cognitive aspects of human nature to the view that the empiricist principle was itself empirical. The problem came to the surface in connection with the prin- ciple of verifiability, the twentieth-century version of the empiricist principle. Critics asked what sort of truth it itself was: empirical or, the only alternative its proponents acknowledged, analytic, true in virtue of the meaning of the words expressing it? Neither option was very attrac- tive. To admit it was empirical left it weak and refutable. To claim it was analytic seemed to conflict with the facts of our use of the word ‘meaning’. Popper frankly admitted that his roughly similar criterion of falsifiablity, as a means of demarcating not sense from nonsense, but science from metaphysics, was a proposal or convention, recom- mended on the grounds of its intellectual advantages. That undogmatic, persuasive conclusion is supported by the widespread recognition that the theory of know- ledge is a normative discipline, an ‘ethics of belief’, setting out rules for the right acceptance of beliefs. That would make it nonsense on the strict letter of the verifiability principle, but, one might say, so much the worse for the verifiability principle. Many present-day philosophers, however, following Quine, have gone back to the position of the classical empiricists by taking the theory of know- ledge to be the cognitive part of empirical psychology. Many unexamined assumptions are more embedded in philosophical writing than those mentioned so far. One, which had a long and significant career, is that the greater cannot emerge from or be produced by the less. It is stated, as something too obvious to require discussion, by Descartes, and drawn on by Locke to prove the existence of God. It was mobilized again in the nineteenth century to dismiss Darwin’s doctrine of evolution, but Darwin’s view emerged victorious from the collision. Another is that sturdy support of mind–body dualism which denies the identity of a mental event with any corresponding brain event on the ground that it is conceivable or logically possible for either to occur without the other occurring. J. J. C. Smart pointed out that there is such a thing as con- tingent identity as of a lightning-flash and an electrical dis- charge, or, one might add, of a billiard-ball that is seen and one that is touched. A philosophical treatise may be presented in a system- atic order which does not correspond at all to the way in which the ideas it contains were arrived at. Premisses and first principles are, therefore, more part of the expository rhetoric of philosophy than of its real substance. But orderly exposition nevertheless contributes valuably to making philosophy accessible to the kind of rational criti- cism on which it thrives. a.q. *empiricism; verification principle. W. W. Bartley, Retreat to Commitment (London, 1964). E. J. Craig, The Mind of God and the Works of Man (Oxford, 1987). J. A. Passmore, Philosophical Reasoning (London, 1961). K. R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (London, 1945), ch. 24. philosophical journals: see journals of philosophy. philosophical logic. Despite its name, philosophical logic is neither a kind of logic nor simply to be identified with the philosophy of logic(s)—the latter being the philosoph- ical examination of systems of logic and their applications. Though the subject of philosophical logic is hard to define precisely, it may loosely be described as the philosophical elucidation of those notions that are indispensable for the proper characterization of rational thought and its con- tents—notions like those of reference, predication, truth, negation, necessity, definition, and entailment. These and related notions are needed in order to give adequate accounts of the structure of thoughts—particularly as expressed in language—and of the relationships in which thoughts stand both to one another and to objects and states of affairs in the world. But it must be emphasized that philosophical logic is not concerned with thought inasmuch as the latter is a psychological process, but only in so far as thoughts have contents which are assessable as true or false. To conflate these concerns is to fall into the error of *psychologism, much decried by Frege. No single way of dividing up the subject-matter of philosophical logic would be agreed upon by all of its prac- titioners, but one convenient division would be this: the- ories of reference, theories of truth, the analysis of complex propositions, theories of modality (that is, of necessity, possibility, and related notions), and theories of argument or rational inference. These topics inevitably overlap, but it is roughly true to say that later topics in the list presup- pose earlier ones to a greater degree than earlier ones pre- suppose later ones. The order of topics in the list reflects a general progression from the study of parts of *propos- itions, through the study of whole and compound propos- itions, to the study of relations between propositions. (Here we use the term ‘proposition’ to denote a thought content assessable as true or false—something expressible by a complete sentence.) Theories of *reference are concerned with the relation- ships between subpropositional or subsentential parts of thought or speech and their extra-mental or extra-linguistic objects—for instance, with the relationship between *names and things named, and with the relationship between predicates and the items to which they apply. According to some theories, a name refers to a particular thing by virtue of its being associated with some descrip- tion which applies uniquely to that thing. Other theories hold that the link between name and thing named is causal in nature. (Theories of either sort are intimately bound up with questions concerning *identity and *individuation.) As for predicates—where a predicate may be thought of as philosophical logic 699 . back to the eighteenth, pessimism to the nineteenth century. The history of the terms themselves reflect the recent growth of the theories. ‘Optimisme’ came into currency in France towards the. are, therefore, more part of the expository rhetoric of philosophy than of its real substance. But orderly exposition nevertheless contributes valuably to making philosophy accessible to the kind. It seems that there are two sides to phenomenological reduc- tion. Firstly, there is a general prescription to look at things without prejudice, to go to the things themselves, to leave theoretical