what remains when one or more names are deleted from a sentence—these are variously held to carry reference to *universals, *concepts, or *classes. Thus the predicate ‘ . . . is red’, formed by deleting the name from a sentence like ‘Mars is red’, is held by some philosophical logicians to stand for the property of redness, by others to express our concept of redness, and by yet others to denote the class of red things. Monolithic theories of reference are unpromis- ing, however. Even if some names refer by way of descrip- tion, other names and namelike parts of speech—such as demonstratives and personal pronouns—plausibly do not. And even if some predicates stand for universals, others—such as negative and disjunctive predicates—can scarcely be held to do so. *Truth and falsehood—if indeed they are properties at all—are properties of whole sentences or propositions, rather than of their subsentential or subpropositional components. Theories of truth are many and various, ranging from the robust and intuitively appealing *corres- pondence theory—which holds that the truth of a sen- tence or proposition consists in its correspondence to extra-linguistic or extra-mental *fact—to the *redun- dancy theory at the other extreme, according to which all talk of truth and falsehood is, at least in principle, elim- inable without loss of expressive power. These two the- ories are examples, respectively, of substantive and *deflationary accounts of truth, other substantive theories being the *coherence theory, the *pragmatic theory, and the *semantic theory, while other deflationary theories include the prosentential theory and the performative the- ory (which sees the truth-predicate ‘ . . . is true’ as a device for the expression of agreement between speakers). As with the theory of reference, a monolithic approach to truth, despite its attractive simplicity, may not be capable of doing justice to all applications of the notion. Thus the correspondence theory, though plausible as regards a pos- teriori or empirical truths, is apparently not equipped to deal with *a priori or *analytic truths, since there is no very obvious ‘fact’ to which a truth like ‘Everything is either red or not red’ can be seen to ‘correspond’. Again, the performative theory, while attractive as an account of the use of a sentence like ‘That’s true!’ uttered in response to another’s assertion, has trouble in accounting for the use of the truth-predicate in the antecedent of a condi- tional, where no assertion is made or implied. Whichever theory or theories of truth a philosophical logician favours, he or she will need at some stage to address questions concerning the value of truth—for instance, why should we aim at truth rather than false- hood?—and the *paradoxes to which the notion of truth can give rise (such as the paradox of the *liar). In the course of those inquiries, fundamental principles thought to govern the notion of truth will inevitably come under scrutiny—such as the principle of *bivalence (the principle that every assertoric sentence is either true or false). A rejection of that principle in some area of discourse is widely supposed to signify an *anti-realist conception of its subject-matter. *Propositions and *sentences can be either simple or complex (atomic or compound). A simple sentence typ- ically concatenates a single name with unitary predicate, as, for example, in ‘Mars is red’. (Relational sentences involve more names, as in ‘Mars is smaller than Venus’, but a sentence like this is still regarded as simple.) One way in which complex sentences can be formed is by modify- ing or connecting simple ones; for instance, by negating ‘Mars is red’ to form the *negation ‘Mars is not red’, or by conjoining it with ‘Venus is white’ to form ‘Mars is red and Venus is white’. Sentential operators and *connectives, like ‘not’, ‘and’, ‘or’, and ‘if’, are extensively studied by philosophical logicians. In many cases, these operators and connectives can plausibly be held to be *truth- functional—meaning that the truth-value of complex sen- tences formed with their aid is determined entirely by the truth-values of the component sentences involved (as, for example, ‘Mars is not red’ is true just in case ‘Mars is red’ is not true). But in other cases—and notably with the condi- tional connective ‘if’—a claim of truth-functionality is less compelling. The analysis of *conditional sentences has accordingly become a major topic in philosophical logic, with some theorists seeing them as involving modal notions while others favour probabilistic analyses. There are other ways of forming complex sentences than by connecting simpler ones, the most important being through the use of *quantifiers—expressions like ‘something’, ‘nobody’, ‘every planet’, and ‘most dogs’. The analysis and interpretation of such expressions forms another major area of philosophical logic. An example of an important issue which arises under this heading is the question how *existential propositions should be under- stood—propositions like ‘Mars exists’ or ‘Planets exist’. According to one approach, the latter may be analysed as meaning ‘Something is a planet’ and the former as ‘Some- thing is identical with Mars’ (both of which involve a quantifier), but this is not universally accepted as correct. Another issue connected with the role of quantifiers is the question how definite *descriptions—expressions of the form ‘the so-and-so’—should be interpreted, whether as referential (or namelike) or alternatively as implicitly quantificational in force, as Russell held. The fourth topic in our list is theories of *modality, that is, accounts of such notions as *necessity, possibility, and contingency, along with associated concepts such as that of analyticity. One broad distinction that is commonly drawn is that between *de re and de dicto necessity and pos- sibility, the former concerning objects and their properties and the latter concerning propositions or sentences. Thus, a supposedly *analytic truth such as ‘All bachelors are unmarried’ is widely regarded as constituting a de dicto necessity, in that, given its meaning, what it says could not be false. But notice that this does not imply that any man who happens to be a bachelor is incapable of being mar- ried—though should he become so, it will, of course, no longer be correct to describe him as a ‘bachelor’. Thus there is no de re necessity for any man to be unmarried, even if he should happen to be a bachelor. By contrast, 700 philosophical logic there arguably is a de re necessity for any man to have a body consisting of flesh and bones, since the property of having such a body is apparently essential to being human. As for the question how, if at all, we can analyse modal propositions, opinions vary between those who regard modal notions as fundamental and irreducible and those who regard them as being explicable in other terms—for instance, in terms of *possible worlds, conceived as ‘ways the world might have been’. (Although this appears circu- lar, in that ‘possible’ and ‘might’ are themselves modal expressions, with care the appearance is arguably remov- able.) For instance, the claim that every man necessarily has a body made of flesh and bones might be construed as equivalent to saying, of each man, that he has a body made of flesh and bones in every possible world in which he exists. However, we should always be on guard against ambiguity when talking of necessity, because it comes in many different varieties—*logical necessity, *metaphys- ical necessity, *epistemic necessity, and *nomic necessity being just four. Modal expressions give rise to special problems in so far as they often appear to create contexts which are non- extensional or ‘opaque’ (*extensionality)—such a context being one in which one term cannot always be substituted for another having the same reference without affecting the truth-value of the modal sentence as a whole in which the term appears. For example, substituting ‘the number of the planets’ for ‘nine’ in the sentence ‘Necessarily, nine is greater than seven’, appears to change its truth-value from truth to falsehood, even though those terms have the same reference. (No such change occurs if the modal expression ‘necessarily’ is dropped from the sentence.) How to handle such phenomena—which also arise in connection with the so-called *propositional attitudes, such as belief—is another widely studied area of philosophical logic. Finally, we come to questions concerning relations between propositions or sentences—relations such as those of *entailment, presupposition, and *confirmation (or probabilistic support). Such relations are the subject- matter of the general theory of rational *argument or *inference, whether *deductive or *inductive. Some the- orists regard entailment as analysable in terms of the modal notion of logical necessity—holding that a propos- ition p entails a proposition q just in case the conjunction of p and the negation of q is logically impossible. This view, however, has the queer consequence that a contra- diction entails any proposition whatever, whence it is rejected by philosophers who insist that there must be a ‘relevant connection’ between a proposition and any proposition which it can be said to entail. (*Relevance logic.) The notion of presupposition, though widely appealed to by philosophers, is difficult to distinguish precisely from that of entailment, but according to one line of thought a statementSpresupposes a statement Tjust in case S fails to be either true or false unless T is true. For instance, the statement that the present King of France is bald might be said to presuppose, in this sense, that France currently has a male monarch. (Such an approach obviously requires some restriction to be placed on the principle of biva- lence.) As for the notion of confirmation, understood as a relation between propositions licensing some form of non-demonstrative inference (such as an inference to the truth of an empirical *generalization from the truth of observation statements in agreement with it), this is widely supposed to be explicable in terms of the theory of *probability—though precisely how the notion of prob- ability should itself be interpreted is still a matter of wide- spread controversy. No general theory of argument or inference would be complete without an account of the various *fallacies and *paradoxes which beset our attempts to reason from prem- iss to conclusion. A ‘good’ argument should at least be truth-preserving, that is, should not carry us from true premisses to a false conclusion. A fallacy is an argument, or form of argument, which is capable of failing in this respect, such as the argument from ‘If Jones is poor, he is honest’ and ‘Jones is honest’ to ‘Jones is poor’ (the fallacy of *affirming the consequent), since these premisses could be true and yet the conclusion false. (Strictly, this only serves to characterize a fallacy of deductive reasoning.) A paradox arises when apparently true premisses appear to lead, by what seems to be a good argument, to a conclu- sion which is manifestly false—a situation which requires us either to reject some of the premisses or to find fault with the method of inference employed. An example would be the paradox of the *heap (the Sorites paradox): one stone does not make a heap, nor does adding one stone to a number of stones which do not make a heap turn them into a heap—from which it appears to follow that no number of stones, however large, can make a heap. This paradox is typical of many which are connected with the *vagueness of many of our concepts and expres- sions, a topic which has received much attention from philosophical logicians in recent years. This is again an area in which the principle of bivalence has come under some pressure. Although philosophical logic should not be confused with the philosophy of logic(s), the latter must ultimately be responsive to considerations addressed by the former. In assessing the adequacy and applicability of any system of formal logic, one must ask whether the *axioms or *rules it employs can, when suitably interpreted, properly serve to articulate the structure of rational thought con- cerning some chosen domain—and this implies that what constitutes *‘rationality’ cannot be laid down by logicians, but is rather something which the formulators of logical systems must endeavour to reflect in the principles of inference which they enunciate. e.j.l. A. C. Grayling, An Introduction to Philosophical Logic (London, 1990). L. Linsky (ed.), Reference and Modality (Oxford, 1971). J. L. Mackie, Truth, Probability and Paradox (Oxford, 1973). A. W. Moore (ed.), Meaning and Reference (Oxford, 1993). W. V. Quine, Philosophy of Logic (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970). P. F. Strawson (ed.), Philosophical Logic (Oxford, 1967). philosophical logic 701 philosophical novel, the: see novel, the philosophical. philosophical practice, the ethics of. Philosophical prac- tice makes strenuous moral demands: honesty and fair- ness to opponents in argument; an ability to tolerate prolonged uncertainty over serious issues; the strength of character to change one’s mind on basic beliefs, and to fol- low the argument rather than one’s emotional leanings; independence of mind rather than readiness to follow philosophical fashion. Moral respect for readers and hearers requires that a philosopher avoid non-rational persuasion, cajoling, deriding, or otherwise manipulating them into agree- ment. Philosophy should demonstrate that we can dis- agree profoundly over fundamentals without lapsing from a common reasonableness. That same respect requires a philosopher to expose the structure of his argu- ment as perspicuously as possible, so as to encourage, not impede, its criticism. Clarity and simplicity of style, the minimizing of tech- nical expressions, abstaining from formal apparatus when ordinary language can be adequate, also express concern to be understood and to let argument and evidence alone carry the persuasive weight. A turgid and obscure style may veil real gaps in argument. A pretentious style may covertly work to disarm critical appraisal, replacing the authority of good argument with the would-be personal authority of the philosopher as sage. Philosophy has a serious responsibility for language. It is one of its most important custodians—obliged to oppose terminologies that arrest or confuse thinking. Slip- shod and imprecise language loses sensitivity to distinc- tions between reasonable and unreasonable, between good and bad argument—in any field, including the fields of personal and political morality. To impoverish the resources of language risks also impoverishing human experience, denying us the words we need to articulate its varieties. Does a stress on style and the stewardship of language imply that philosophy is a branch of literature? In some important ways it is literature. But the rapprochement is carried too far when a philosopher lets the imaginatively vivid presentation of a slant on the world give it an appear- ance of self-evidence, and deflects critical alertness from the fact that categories have not been deduced and rea- soned justification has been subordinated to expressing the quasi-poetic ‘vision’. Philosophers, then, need a wholesome sense of their fallibility. It is unwise for a philosopher to aspire to the role of expert or authority; for that works towards weakening the critical attentiveness constantly needed from readers and hearers. r.w.h. *pseudo-philosophy. Max Black (ed.), The Morality of Scholarship (Ithaca, NY, 1967). philosophy. Most definitions of philosophy are fairly con- troversial, particularly if they aim to be at all interesting or profound. That is partly because what has been called phil- osophy has changed radically in scope in the course of his- tory, with many inquiries that were originally part of it having detached themselves from it. The shortest defin- ition, and it is quite a good one, is that philosophy is think- ing about thinking. That brings out the generally second-order character of the subject, as reflective thought about particular kinds of thinking—formation of beliefs, claims to knowledge—about the world or large parts of it. A more detailed, but still uncontroversially compre- hensive, definition is that philosophy is rationally critical thinking, of a more or less systematic kind about the gen- eral nature of the world (metaphysics or theory of exist- ence), the justification of belief (epistemology or theory of knowledge), and the conduct of life (ethics or theory of value). Each of the three elements in this list has a non- philosophical counterpart, from which it is distinguished by its explicitly rational and critical way of proceeding and by its systematic nature. Everyone has some general con- ception of the nature of the world in which they live and of their place in it. *Metaphysics replaces the unargued assumptions embodied in such a conception with a rational and organized body of beliefs about the world as a whole. Everyone has occasion to doubt and question beliefs, their own or those of others, with more or less suc- cess and without any theory of what they are doing. *Epis- temology seeks by argument to make explicit the rules of correct belief-formation. Everyone governs their conduct by directing it to desired or valued ends. Ethics, or *moral philosophy, in its most inclusive sense, seeks to articulate, in rationally systematic form, the rules or principles involved. (In practice ethics has generally been confined to conduct in its moral aspect and has largely ignored the large part of our actions that we guide by considerations of prudence or efficiency, as if these were too base to deserve rational examination.) The three main parts of philosophy are related in vari- ous ways. For us to guide our conduct rationally we need a general conception of the world in which it is carried out and of ourselves as acting in it. Metaphysics presupposes epistemology, both to authenticate the special forms of reasoning on which it relies and to assure the correctness of the large assumptions which, in some of its varieties, it makes about the nature of things, such as that nothing comes out of nothing, that there are recurrences in the world and our experience of it, that the mental is not in space. The earliest recognized philosophers, the Pre-Socratics, were primarily metaphysicians, concerned to establish the essential character of nature as a whole, from the first cryptic utterance of Thales: ‘All is water.’ Parmenides is the first metaphysician whose arguments have come down to us. For the reasons given by the famous para- doxes of Zeno, he concluded that the world did not move and occupied all space. The Sophists, by sceptically chal- lenging conventional moral assumptions, brought ethics into existence, notably in Socrates. Plato and Aristotle wrote comprehensively on metaphysics and ethics; Plato 702 philosophical novel, the on knowledge; Aristotle on (deductive) logic, the most rigorous technique for the justification of belief, setting out its rules in a systematic form which retained their intellectual authority for over 2,000 years. In the Middle Ages philosophy, in service to Christian- ity, drew first on the metaphysics of Plato, then on Aris- totle’s, to defend religious beliefs. In the Renaissance free metaphysical speculation revived and, in its later phase, with Bacon and, more influentially, Descartes and Locke, turned to epistemology to ratify and, as far as possible to accommodate to religion, the new developments in nat- ural science. Hume argued that such an accommodation is impossible, as indeed is metaphysics generally. In contin- ental Europe Spinoza and Leibniz practised deductive metaphysics in the style of Parmenides and with compar- ably astonishing results. Kant, brought up in that tradition, was shaken out of it by reading Hume, rejected meta- physics in its traditional varieties, and ascribed the order of the public world to the formative work of the mind on its experiences. His German successors, taking advantage of some inconsistencies in Kant, revived metaphysics in the grand manner. In Britain the empiricism of Locke and Hume prevailed, and epistemology remained the central philosophical discipline up to the middle of the present century. Metaphysics has various ways of setting about its none too clearly formulated topic: the general nature of the world. The first is that of purely rational demonstration. In this, large and striking conclusions are arrived at by showing that their denials involve self-contradiction. A prime example is the ontological proof of the existence of God. God is defined as perfect. A God that exists is more perfect than something, otherwise identical, that does not. Therefore God necessarily exists. In the same style Leibniz proves that reality is, in its ultimate constitution, mental, and Bradley finds contradictions lurking in the whole repertoire of fundamental notions of common belief and science (relation, plurality, time, space, the self, and so on) to arrive at the conclusion that reality is a single, indisseverable tissue of experience, a spiritual unity in which nature and personal individuality are absorbed. A second metaphysical procedure is to derive conclu- sions about what lies behind ‘appearance’, the perceptible surface of the world, about the true or ultimate reality that transcends appearance. Prime examples here are the argu- ments for God’s existence from the world’s need of a first cause and from the marks of intelligent design in the order of the perceived world. Even more important for the his- tory of philosophy is Plato’s theory of Forms or objective universals, not in space and time but in a world of their own, invoked to explain our recognition of recurrent properties in the flux of appearance and to serve as the objects of eternally true items of mathematical knowledge. Hume attacked demonstrative metaphysics on epistemo- logical grounds. Purely rational argument can establish only the formal truths of logic and mathematics. The denial of a self-contradictory statement is not a substantial truth of fact, it is merely verbal, reflecting conventions for the use of words. Kant attacked transcendent meta- physics, arguing that the notions of substance and cause which it applies beyond the bounds of experience can yield knowledge only when applied to the raw material supplied by the senses. The Logical Positivists attacked transcendent metaphysics more vehemently with their verifiability principle, contending that its affirmations are devoid of meaning since uncheckable by experience. Kant also opposed a kind of metaphysics which does not so much go behind the scenes of appearance as side- ways from them by extrapolating indefinitely from them, as in the theses that the world is infinitely large, has existed from eternity, is composed of infinitesimal parts, and so on. He paired off assertions of these kinds with their denials and argued, in apparent defiance of logic, that both members of each pair were self-contradictory. This kind of metaphysics, dealing with the quantitatively (rather than, as transcendent metaphysics does, with the qualita- tively) inaccessible, would seem open to the same objec- tions, if they are correct. Survivors of the long conflict between metaphysics and its detractors are theories of what has been called ‘cat- egories of being’. Dualism of the mental and physical, most sharply focused in Descartes, but pervasive long before and after him, is the most familiar of these. It has epistemological roots. One is the distinction between two kinds of experience: sensation and introspection. Another is the alleged infallibility of beliefs about one’s own mind as contrasted with the fallibility of all beliefs about the objective material world. Materialists such as Hobbes argue that mental activity is bodily, if on a very small scale. Idealists such as Berkeley (and, in a way, phenomenalists such as Mill) argue that material bodies are complexes of sensations, both actual and either in the mind of God or hypothetical. The Platonic realm of ideas houses a third alleged cat- egory, that of abstractions, such as properties, relations, classes, numbers, propositions. Values have been installed as a category so as to provide something for judgements of value to be true of. Monism may be neither materialistic nor idealistic, but neutral. Russell, William James, Mach, even Hume up to a point, regarded both bodies and minds as composed of the same kinds of sensation, actual and possible, and the images that copy them. The two kinds of sensation com- bine to constitute bodies; sensations and images consti- tute minds. Beside the kind of large-scale metaphysics considered hitherto, which aims at a conception of the world as a whole, there is a kind of small-scale metaphysics which examines the detailed structure of the world: individuals, their properties, and their relations to one another; the events in their history, and thus change, and also the states which are the dull, and the processes which are the more eventful, parts of that history; the facts which are the hav- ing of properties by individuals; and so on. Aristotle’s doc- trine of categories set this going as an organized inquiry philosophy 703 (his categories being quite different from the categories of being mentioned earlier). It has now been to some extent absorbed into philosophical logic, since its pervasive fea- tures of the structure of the world correspond to the for- mal characteristics of discourse (of thought and speech) which are assumed as the basic distinctions of formal logic. The fundamental, but not most interesting, question of epistemology is that of the definition of knowledge. Plato addressed it in his Theaetetus and came up with the crucial result that it is something more than true belief, although it includes it. The idea that justification is the missing elem- ent runs into difficulties unless, as many hold, the infinite regress it seems to generate is stopped by maintaining that some beliefs are not justified by others, but by experience. For many philosophers, however, the problem is in itself of little interest since knowledge is of little interest. What matters is rational or justified true belief. However, it has been persuasively suggested that the missing third element in the definition is that the true belief should be non-accidental or that it should be caused by the fact that makes it true. Nearly all epistemology involves two large distinctions: the first between what Leibniz called truths of reason and truths of fact, the second between what is acquired directly or immediately and what is acquired by inference. Truths of reason are necessarily true and discoverable a priori, that is to say without reliance on the senses and purely by thinking. Truths of fact are contingent and rest on experi- ence for their justification. The two distinctions overlap. Some truths of reason must be immediate if any are to be inferred. These, primarily, are taken to be the axioms or first principles of logic and mathematics. The conven- tional view about non-immediate truths of fact is that they are indeed inferred, but not by deductive logic. For them, it is held, induction, the derivation of unrestricted general- izations from a limited number of their singular instances, is required. Whewell, Peirce, and, most vehemently, Pop- per have denied, or, at any rate, marginalized, induction. As they see it, general statements are first proposed as hypotheses worthy of examination, then their singular deductive consequences are examined; they are rejected if these turn out to be false, but preserved, with increasing confidence, the larger the number of tests they survive. This corresponds more closely to scientific practice than does the conventional theory of induction, but has the appearance of letting induction in by the back door. Leibniz thought that all truths of reason rested on the law of contradiction but did not go on to conclude, as Hume and most subsequent empiricists have, that they are therefore analytic, in the sense that they are verbal, simply reiterating in what they assert something they have already assumed. Kant took the central problem of philosophy to be that of whether and how any beliefs are both synthetic, really substantial in content, and also a pri- ori, discoverable by reason alone. He concluded that there were such beliefs: those of arithmetic and geometry and such ‘presuppositions of natural science’ as that there is fixed, permanent quantity of matter in nature and that every event has a cause. He went on to ascribe the neces- sary truth of these substantial beliefs to the mind’s impos- ition of order on the chaos of experience to which it is subjected. Few have followed him this far. Mill held that mathematical truths are really empirical; Herbert Spencer that what seem to be necessary truths are the well- confirmed empirical beliefs we inherit from our ancestors. More recently Quine has argued that there is no difference in kind between truths of reason and truths of fact at all, only in the degree of our determination to hold on to them in the face of discouraging evidence. The distinction between the direct and the inferred has also been challenged at various times, the present included, by philosophers who cannot see a way out of the maze of beliefs. Current coherence theorists of know- ledge follow in the steps of Hegelian idealists and the Vien- nese positivists (until Tarski led them out of the maze). Part of the hold of the distinction comes from the ancient principle that our perception of objective, material things is not direct, since it is always fallible, as shown by our liability to illusion, and so must be inferred from the sup- posedly infallible knowledge we do have of our private, subjective sense-impressions. Is this inference valid, or, at least, defensible? If not, must we sceptically suspend belief in the material world? If it is, what sort of inference is it: to more things of the same kind, actual and possible impres- sions, or to something of a different, experience- transcending kind, namely unexperienceable matter? The pattern of this problem, and the form of its possible solu- tions, has been seen to be repeated in a number of other cases. The evidence for our beliefs about the past is all pre- sent, our recollections and traces; how do we cross the gap, if we can? Our beliefs about other minds are based on what we observe their bodies to do and say. A solution not mentioned so far is that of denying the assumption that we are confined to the evidence specified. That seems more attractive in the case of perception, where it would imply that we perceive material objects directly, although not infallibly, and in the case of our beliefs about the past, where our recollections simply are our straightforward beliefs about the past, not evidence for them, than in the case of other minds, where some sort of telepathy would seem needed. The importance and centrality of these three kinds of belief hardly need to be stressed, not just for science, history, and psychology, but for our entire cognitive life. A curious feature about epistemology is the very slight attention it has given to the source of by far the greater part of our beliefs, namely the testimony of others: par- ents, teachers, textbooks, encyclopaedias. There is an interesting problem here. If we depend on them for the principles by which we check the reliability of what we are told, how do we ever achieve cognitive autonomy? *Logic, which, as was said earlier, is the most powerful or coercive instrument for the justification of belief, is never taken to be part of epistemology. It was systemat- ically organized before epistemology had established itself as an identifiable discipline. It began as, and still partly 704 philosophy remains, as orderly arrangement of rules of inference which apply to all kinds of thought and speech. From Aris- totle to the mid-nineteenth century it largely slumbered. Since then it has been greatly enlarged, with Aristotle’s logic included in a mildly modified way, and has become from one point of view a branch of mathematics. Its elem- ents have always been seen as an essential preamble to the study of philosophy, and still are today. It is not exactly a part of philosophy, although critical reflection on its assumptions, philosophical logic, unquestionably is. There are a large, and indeed indeterminate, number of specialized philosophical disciplines, philosophies of this and that—mind, language, mathematics, science (natural and social), history, religion, law, education, even sport and sex. Where the special field is, as in the cases of science and history, a form of the pursuit of knowledge, the corres- ponding philosophy is primarily epistemological. The metaphysics of nature is an idea calculated to put scientists off, although the problem of the reality of theoretical entities such as fundamental particles could well be remitted to it. Speculative or metaphysical philosophy of history, the elaboration of general schemes or patterns (cyclical or pro- gressive) of the totality of historical events, is also regarded with suspicion. The rational basis for that suspicion is a topic for the critical, epistemological philosophy of history. The *philosophy of mind, as currently pursued, began from the epistemological problem of how we can know what is going on in another’s mind. But it has come to be metaphysical. The old problem of personal identity can be posed either as ‘How do we know that someone existing now is the same person as someone who existed at some previous time?’ or as ‘What is it for a person existing now to be identical with a person who existed before?’ If per- sonal identity, our own as well as that of others, is not to be inaccessible and unknowable, the two questions should receive much the same answer. The *philosophy of science is often taken to embrace topics which are important for pre-scientific thinking. One of these is that of the nature of causation and the associ- ated issue of how a lawful connection is to be distin- guished from a merely accidental concomitance. Another is that of the justification of induction and of the interpret- ation of the probability, or kinds of probability, it confers on its conclusions. Causal relations, general beliefs, and beliefs held to be no more than probable are all indispens- able features of ordinary common-sense thinking. The third and final main division of philosophy is ethics, or theory of value, the rationally critical examination of our thinking about the conduct of life. Action, as con- trasted with mere behaviour, is the result of choice, the comparison of alternatives, undertaken in the light of the desirability or otherwise of their consequences and of the possibility or easiness of doing them. Two kinds of belief, then, are involved in action: ordinary, straight- forward factual beliefs about what is involved in doing something and what its results will be, and beliefs about the value of those results and, perhaps, the disvalue of what we must do to secure them. In fact, in post-Greek ethics, the kind of action that has monopolized attention is moral action, fairly narrowly conceived. That is probably the result of religious enthusi- asm. Christianity began as a millennialist religion, indiffer- ent to worldly concerns and preoccupied with salvation, partly out of conviction of the worthlessness of the world and the flesh, even more from a belief that the world was about to end anyway. Whatever the cause of this narrow vision it has had a distorting effect. In principle ethics should consider all kinds of deliberate, thoughtful con- duct: prudent conduct and self-interested conduct, which aim, respectively, at minimum loss and maximum gain for the agent, technically efficient conduct, economical con- duct, healthy conduct, and so on. Moral goodness and rightness are only one kind of rightness. Logic and episte- mology, indeed, since they are concerned to distinguish right from wrong in reasoning and belief, can be described as the ethics of inference and belief without metaphorical licence. Religious influence on morality caused it to be seen as God’s commands to mankind. Since this led to problems of authentication and interpretation, God’s voice was internalized, either as a kind of moral sense, perceiving the moral quality of actions and the characters of agents, or as a kind of moral reason, apprehending the self-evident necessity of moral principles. Two questionable assump- tions are involved in these two kinds of moral intuition- ism. The first is that moral characteristics are sui generis, quite unrelated logically to any natural, perceivable char- acteristics of agents and their actions. The second is that actions, or kinds of action, are intrinsically right or wrong, whatever consequences they may have or be expected to have. Both features, if really distinctive of morality, would make it wholly different from other modes of action. Utilitarians reject both the distinguishing assumptions. They derive the rightness or wrongness of actions from the goodness or badness of their consequences, most plausibly from the consequences it would have been reasonable for the agent to have expected rather than from the actual consequences. Secondly, they take good- ness to be pleasure or happiness, more exactly the general happiness, the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The doctrine would have been in closer accord with unreflective moral sentiment if it had been formulated negatively: an action is wrong if it causes harm to another, is permissible if it does not, and is morally creditable if it prevents or alleviates the suffering of another. For all their differences intuitionists and utilitarians agree that there are objective moral truths and falsehoods. The bulk and intensity of moral disagreement lend colour to the claims of moral sceptics, who claim that moral judgements are no more than expressions of our likes and dislikes and that disagreements about moral issues are col- lisions of feeling that cannot be settled by rational means. The fundamental question for ethics, conceived simply as moral philosophy, is whether our moral convictions have any objective validity and, if so, of what kind. Are they, as intuitionists suppose, convictions of a unique and special philosophy 705 kind, or can they be brought into logical connection with the rest of our beliefs? Are the moral properties of actions intrinsic to them or are they dependent on the conse- quences of action? In what does virtue or moral goodness consist? Is it the disposition to do right actions or, more narrowly, the disposition to do right actions just because they are right? Under what conditions do agents deserve blame (or praise) for their actions? Does moral responsi- bilty presuppose freedom of the will in the sense of free- dom from any causal influence on choice? Two other established forms of the theory of value are *political philosophy and *aesthetics. Political philosophy is an extension of ethics into the domain of organized social institutions and, like ethics generally, is perhaps over-moralized. Its fundamental problem is the basis of the moral obligation of the citizen to obey the state and its laws, which, viewed from the other end, is that of the state to compel the citizen to obey it. (It might be more inter- esting to inquire what it is that makes it generally reason- able for citizens to obey.) Does the obligation to obey depend on the content of the laws or on the way the state was set up and is maintained? Do men have rights that limit the morally legitimate sphere of action of the state? Aesthetic value is recognized as distinct from moral value despite the appearance of moral elements in criti- cism—sometimes relevantly, sometimes intrusively. It is not very satisfactorily indicated by the word ‘beauty’. Other languages do better. ‘Beau’ and ‘schön’ mean fine, the property of objects of art or nature deserving attentive contemplation for their own sake, independently of any further use we may put them to or any information we may get from studying them. The more established parts of philosophy have all been mentioned here, but there is no evident limit to its field of application. Wherever there is a large idea whose mean- ing is in some way indeterminate or controversial, so that large statements in which it occurs are hard to support or undermine and stand in unclear logical relations to other beliefs we are comparatively clear about, there is opportun- ity and point for philosophical reflection. a.q. *Appendix: Maps of Philosophy; Appendix: Chrono- logical Table of Philosophy; philosophy, the influence of; philosophy, value and use of; philosophy, world and underworld; metaphilosophy; pseudo-philosophy; publishing philosophy; world philosophy. A. J. Ayer, The Central Questions of Philosophy (London, 1973). Keith Campbell, Metaphysics (Encino, Calif., 1976). Anthony O’Hear, What Philosophy Is (Harmondsworth, 1985). W. V. Quine and J. Ullian, The Web of Belief (New York, 1970). Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford, 1980). philosophy, chronology of: see Appendix. philosophy, history of centres and departments of. *Philosophy is a collaborative pursuit, unlike the medita- tive activity of sages which is commonly conceived to flourish best in isolated or even hermetic conditions. The form of collaboration involved, however, is not co-operative, like that of a surgical team, but competitive, a business of critical argument. Argument is meant to per- suade, and to succeed must overcome counter-argument. Sages merely issue pronouncements to those who visit their retreats. Philosophers, therefore, are to a large extent found in groups, as is suggested by the large number of philosophical works composed in dialogue form: most of Plato’s, for example, Scotus Eriugena’s De Divisione Naturae, some of Berkeley’s and Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion. The first three universally recognized philosophers— Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes—all came from Miletus, a prosperous Greek city in Ionia, on the western coast of what is now Turkey. It was overwhelmed by the Persians in 494 bc. Pythagoras was born in the neighbour- ing island of Samos, but removed himself—perhaps from dislike of the tyrant Polycrates, perhaps from fear of the Persians—to Croton in southern Italy, where he set up a tightly knit and disciplined school. Parmenides and his fol- lowers came from Elea on the lower shin, rather than, as with Croton, the fall of the foot of Italy. Anaxagoras, another Ionian, first brought philosophy to Athens, where he lived for some thirty years around the middle of the fifth century bc. From that date until the emperor Justinian closed the Athenian philosophical schools in ad 529, Athens remained the centre of philosophy, drawing people from other parts of the Greek, and later Roman, world to it, such as the Macedonian Aristotle, as well as producing philosophers of its own, of whom the greatest was Plato. The Sceptics Arcesilaus and Carneades were, at different times, heads of Plato’s *Academy. Zeno, from Citium in Cyprus, and Epicurus, from Samos, the founders of Stoicism and Epicureanism, both settled in Athens. After the political collapse of Athens at the end of the fifth century bc two other great culturally significant cities developed, and philosophy was pursued there. In Alexan- dria, more notable for science and mathematics than for philosophy, there were Aenesidemus, Philo Judaeus, and the great systematizers of Christian doctrine Clement and Origen. Plotinus was educated there, but settled in Rome. The native Roman philosophers were of a popular, liter- ary character: Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Tertullian lived in, and St Augustine near to, Carthage but 200 years apart, which hardly makes Carthage a philosophical centre. But since Augustine did not leave it until he was 28 it must have had some philosophical culture. Boethius, the last ancient philosopher, or the first medieval one, was of an ancient Roman family and lived in Italy until his execution by the Ostrogoth king Theodric. Between Boethius’ death in 525 and the active career of St Anselm in the latter half of the eleventh century, philoso- phy outside the Arab world is almost a blank, probably as much in fact as in our knowledge of it. The solitary figure of substance in these 500 years is the Irish Neoplatonist John Scotus Eriugena. He was called to the Frankish Court of Charles the Bald in the late ninth century because of a reputation the Christian civilization of Ireland had been 706 philosophy able to retain until the Vikings destroyed it. The complex- ity and professional sophistication of his work and his knowledge of Greek throw a favourable, if not very infor- mative, light on the state of Irish culture in his time. Learning gradually revived, first in monastic schools such as those of York, Fulda, and St Gall. Of particular philosophical interest is that of Bec, in Normandy, where Lanfranc taught Anselm. Both were Italians and both became Archbishop of Canterbury. By the beginning of the twelfth century, around the time of Anselm’s death, Paris emerged as the major philosophical centre. William of Champeaux, of the cathedral school there, is the first notable figure. More important was the brilliant and charismatic Abelard, who drew great numbers of students to the city. He was followed by Peter Lombard, compiler of the Sentences on which many medieval philosophers felt bound to produce a commentary, and by the Victorines. By 1215 the cathedral schools of Paris were sufficiently unified to be recognized as a university. There had been universities before, most notably at Salerno and Bologna, but they specialized in medicine and law respectively and were governed by their students. Rashdall descried signs of a university in Paris around 1170. By the thirteenth century it was fully fledged and philosophically dominant. The Englishman Alexander of Hales, his pupil St Bonaventure, the German Albertus Magnus, St Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, even the fourteenth-century German mystic Meister Eckhart, all studied or taught there, often both. Oxford, where Franciscans secured a dominance like that of the Dominicans in Paris, started soon after Paris, but did not displace it until the fourteenth century. The Augustinian Robert Grosseteste, the first important Oxford philosopher and first Chancellor of the university, had Roger Bacon for a pupil, and from his time until the Black Death in 1348 Oxford was the home of a host of productive philosophers. The first of these to be of major significance was Duns Scotus, who shared with the largely very different William of Ockham a conviction of the impotence of reason in the supernatural domain. That marked Oxford off from the Paris of Aquinas, who held and copiously expressed the opposite view. Oxford declined as a philosophical centre after the mid- dle of the fourteenth century. The persistent heresies of Wyclif, its ablest late fourteenth-century philosopher, bringing down ecclesiastical repression, completed the work done by the Black Death. The Ockhamist tradition survived in Paris with John Buridan, Albert of Saxony, Nicole d’Oresme, and the combatively sceptical Nicholas of Autrecourt. With Gerson, who died in 1429, who used Ockham’s nominalism to support mystical conclusions, the first great age of Parisian philosophy came to an end. The first centre of the new Platonic humanism of the Renaissance was the Academy in Florence, founded in the mid-fifteenth century by Cosimo dei Medici, under the inspiration of the Byzantine Gemistus Pletho and his pupil Cardinal Bessarion and with Ficino and Pico della Miran- dola as its most gifted members. The Florentine Academy had more influence on literature and culture generally than on philosophy proper. Much more philosophically important was the University of Padua, site of a protracted controversy between two schools of interpreters of Aris- totle: the Alexandrists (Pomponazzi, Zabarella, Cre- monini) and the Averroists. Padua had been taken over by Venice in 1403; its thinkers benefited from the firm resist- ance of the parent city to papal interference. Galileo was Professor of Mathematics at Padua from 1592 to 1610. There was some philosophical vitality in Spain in the sixteenth century, notably at Salamanca, the chief figures being Vittoria and the great, last-ditch systematizer of scholasticism: Suarez. But in France and England there was little going on in the religious turmoil of the sixteenth century as Protestantism was suppressed in the former and Catholicism in the latter. There was an active group of young English humanists at Oxford early in the sixteenth century, assembled around the visiting Erasmus, Colet, Thomas More, and Grocyn. Its interests were largely theological and after ten years its members went off in different directions. For most of the sixteenth century there was no philosophical centre of note. From this time until the mid-eighteenth century in Germany and Scotland and the mid-nineteenth century in France and England the universities were largely torpid. Interesting philosophers were all independent men of let- ters. But there were some significant informal groupings. The most eminent of these was the circle of the abbé Mersenne, who served as a link between Descartes, Pascal, Gassendi, Arnauld, and Hobbes, recruiting the last three to write critical comments on Descartes’s Meditations. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understand- ing was the outcome of a discussion group considering questions of morality and revealed religion, which proved to need a philosophical foundation. But, for the most part, Locke worked alone, as did Spinoza and Leibniz, Berkeley and Hume. In Cambridge, a little earlier, there had been the circle of Platonists led by Cudworth and Henry More. Holland was not exactly a philosophical centre in the seventeenth century, but major philosophers flourished there, despite a measure of persecution: Spinoza above all and Hugo Grotius. Equally important, Holland, because of its comparative tolerance of unorthodox religious opin- ions, was much favoured as a place of refuge for philoso- phers from France and England who were, or reasonably thought they would become, objects of oppression: Descartes early in the century, Locke and Bayle later. Hume at least had the beneficent social setting of eight- eenth-century Edinburgh and the friendship of Adam Smith. During his lifetime the Scottish universities came to life intellectually, keeping him out but taking in to the professoriate Hutcheson, Ferguson, Adam Smith, Reid and Dugald Stewart. So did the universities of Germany. There were a great many of them, none, after the brief ini- tial glory of Halle, particularly predominating. That may be the cause, if it is not the effect, of the characteristically dogmatic and authoritarian character of German philosophy, history of centres and departments of 707 professorial behaviour, which does not invite, or even allow for, critical exchange. The most attractive philosophical centre of the eight- eenth century was the world of the *philosophes in Paris, agreeably anchored to the material world by the salons of Mme d’Holbach and Mme Helvétius. D’Holbach and Diderot were the philosophically most substantial of the group; Voltaire and Rousseau were, in different degrees, spiritually and, for the most part, physically remote. The contemporary drinking-clubs of Edinburgh performed a similar service in an even more philosophically marginal way. In England the circle around Bentham, animated by James Mill and culminating in J. S. Mill, was a more aus- tere kind of salon. Kant, notoriously, spent his entire life in the spiritual Siberia of Königsberg. Fichte and Hegel were at Jena and Berlin (Schelling was also briefly at Berlin, as Schopen- hauer had been even more briefly). Schleiermacher was active in Berlin through the whole Hegelian period. After the middle of the nineteenth century German philoso- phers seemed to be spread broadly over the universities of the whole country. Lotze was at Göttingen, where Herbart had finished his career. Cohen and Natorp were at Marburg, Windelband and Rickert at Heidelberg, lead- ing the two neo-Kantian schools. Dilthey and Cassirer both wound up in Berlin after various wanderings. Wundt was at Leipzig, Brentano at Vienna. This monadic organi- zation of philosophy continued into the present century, with Husserl at Göttingen and then Freiburg im Breisgau, where his pupil Heidegger supplanted him. By the middle of the nineteenth century, when German philosophy was fully professionalized, it was just taking the first steps in that direction in Britain and France. The concentration of the French university system on Paris has persisted to the present day, with nearly every philoso- pher of note winding up there sooner or later. In Britain, as Scottish philosophy petered out with the death of Hamil- ton in 1856, its doctrines were kept going with style and professionalism in Oxford by H. L. Mansel. Soon after his death in 1871 the idealist school of T. H. Green, Bradley, and Bosanquet quickly expanded and penetrated the rest of the country with the partial exception of Cambridge (for there were idealists there too, McTaggart, Ward, and Sorley, for example). But the latter soon gave way to the realists Russell and Moore after 1903, and they, in turn, in the 1930s, to Wittgenstein. (*Oxford philosophy; *Cam- bridge philosophy.) Cambridge had made little contribution to philosophy in the Middle Ages, although it had come into existence very soon after Oxford. However, under the Tudor mon- archs its former Protestantism had secured royal favour and, while Oxford slept, it produced Bacon and, later in the sixteenth century, the Cambridge Platonists with their massively learned reaction to Hobbes. In more recent times Cambridge, where philosophy has been studied as a full-time specialized subject, has always had many fewer students of philosophy than Oxford, where it has always been studied in conjunction with other subjects. Never- theless the two universities achieved philosophical profes- sionalism at much the same time, in Cambridge with Whewell, John Grote, and finally Sidgwick. Then, from about 1900, there was an extraordinary efflorescence. Four philosophers of outstanding gifts—Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey—enabled Cambridge to domi- nate English philosophy until after the Second World War, despite the overwhelming numbers of their less inspiring Oxford colleagues. When Oxford philosophy revived, it was through the work of Cambridge- influenced Oxford philosophers: Price, Ryle, and Ayer. With these three, together with Austin and Strawson, Oxford took the lead and attracted visiting American philosophers in the first few post-war decades to such an extent that one of them reasonably described it as ‘a philo- sophical boom town’. But since about 1970 the direction of movement has been reversed. The universities of America were not much more than high schools or seminaries until well into the nineteenth century. Before that the only centre had been the Boston area, where Emerson and the Transcendentalists were to be found. (*Transcendentalism.) There was a great period or golden age at Harvard from about 1890 up to the First World War, in the epoch of James, Santayana, and Royce, and with Peirce in the background. Another, still in progress, began at the end of the Second World War. (*Harvard philosophy.) Dewey presided over an active department at Columbia, in the inter-war years the official headquarters of pragmatism. Berkeley, Princeton, and Michigan have been important departments since the 1940s. This period has been one in which a Germanic sys- tem of scattered local heroes has been largely overcome by the dominance of a few major centres, above all Har- vard. Recently, after a period in which it either produced or drew to itself a very large proportion of the most highly regarded American philosophers, Harvard has suffered by the departure from the scene, either by death or retire- ment, of most of these leading figures: Quine, Goodman, Putnam, Nozick, and Rawls, who have not been replaced by quite such magnetic people. A new centre appears to be developing in the New York metropolitan area, embra- cing Columbia and New York University in the city itself and Princeton and Rutgers in neighbouring New Jersey. a.q. *pragmatism. Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophers (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). B. Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000 (Oxford, 2001). J. H. Newman, Rise and Progress of Universities in Historical Sketches (London, 1873), i. philosophy, literary genres of. Philosophers have often been reluctant to admit that what they write is, in a sense, literature. Plato, a great poet, had the poets expelled from his Republic. Nevertheless, philosophy has been written through the centuries with regard to literary form and in accordance with various literary genres. 708 philosophy, history of centres and departments of The dialogue was more or less invented by Plato and was used by him with unsurpassed mastery. But it has been used by other philosophers as well. Cicero in his philosophical dialogues imitated Plato. Berkeley, Hume, and Schelling (among others) used the form in more recent times. The dialogue serves to make clear that phil- osophy essentially is debate, controversy, dialectical argument. The commentary is also a venerable genre. It was used in antiquity by e.g. Proclus in his influential commentaries on Plato. Among Arabic philosophers it was a favourite genre. Al-Farabi and Averroës became famous for their commentaries on Plato and Aristotle, and through them influenced later Latin medieval philosophy. But the com- mentary did not lose its importance with the waning of scholasticism. Even in modern times commentaries on Kant (Cohen, Cassirer, Bennett), on Hegel (McTaggart, Kojève, Hippolyte) or on Marx (Lukács, Althusser) have had an important impact. Philosophy feeds on philoso- phy. New interpretations of major thinkers open up new vistas. The intellectual autobiography is useful for showing why a certain line of argument has seemed plausible or even necessary to the author and for bringing out the interplay between ideas and personalities. Plato’s Seventh Letter, Augustine’s Confessions, Descartes’s Discourse on the Method, Mill’s Autobiography, and Popper’s Unended Quest could be mentioned here. The short article is a genre adapted to the specialized philosophical journal of modern times. Within analytical philosophy the short article has suited the idea that the aim of philosophy is piecemeal problem-solving rather than building of systems. s.n. Berel Lang, The Anatomy of Philosophical Style (Oxford, 1990). philosophy, the influence of. The most direct influence of philosophy has been the speculative initiation, and incubation within itself, of other intellectual disciplines: physics and mathematics from the early Greeks, Christian theology from Plato, Plotinus, and Aristotle, law from Hobbes and Bentham, economics and psychology from Locke, Hume, and the Utilitarians, criticism from Aris- totle and Kant. This is really too intimate a relation to be described as influence and is, accordingly, a little more fully discussed in this Companion under the heading philosophy, the value and use of. The main influence, properly speaking, of philosophy has been to underlie and, to a considerable extent, to inspire a great number of significant movements of thought embodying attitudes to man and society and, as bearing on them, nature and the universe at large. The first of these is *Stoicism, whose ideals of fortitude, cos- mopolitanism, and public service suited the traditional outlook of the Romans and served them well as the work- ing ideology of their world empire. More profound and lasting was the influence of the philosophies of Plato, and, even more, Plotinus, on the elaborate and sophisticated system of Christian theology with which the Fathers of the Church transformed an intellectually rudimentary kind of dissident Judaism into the operative faith of the Western world for a millennium and a half. With the recovery of Aristotle for the West in the twelfth century, Augustine’s Neoplatonic theology was greatly modified by Thomist *scholasticism, but was revived by the Protestant Reformation, which was to a large extent anti-philosophical, despite the part played in its emergence by men trained in philosophy: Wyclif, Luther, Calvin, and Melanchthon. The rejection of Thomist rationalism by Ockham, and his confinement of rational knowledge to the empirically intuitable natural world, led his followers, notably Buridan and Oresme, to anticipate the great scientific flowering of the seventeenth century with theories of inertia and a mechanical conception of nature. A renewed study of Plato was at the centre of the preoccupation of the leading figures of the Renaissance with the human soul. Descartes, although finally overwhelmed by Newton, for some time took a dominant place in the seventeenth- century scientific revolution, in which, like Leibniz, he directly participated. The application of ‘the experimental method of reason- ing to moral subjects’ practised by Hobbes and Hume (and so described by the latter) was too scandalous in its first appearance to have much immediate influence. Locke, in whom empiricism and Gassendi’s materialism were mitigated by borrowings from Descartes, in effect invented *liberalism. He exerted a major influence on the *philosophes of eighteenth-century France by way of Voltaire. They cleared the ground for the French Revolu- tion by their criticisms of absolute monarchy and its ideo- logical instrument, the Church. But it was Rousseau who was to inspire the extreme, Jacobin phase of the Revolu- tion. In the United States Locke was taken over wholesale and was honourably plagiarized in the Declaration of Independence. As the ideologist of the Glorious Revolu- tion of 1688, he was not without honour at home. His principles were invoked by the Whig governments which were dominant through most of the eighteenth-century in Britain; wholly until the accession of George III in 1760 and from time to time until the start of a long period of Tory rule in 1784. *Romanticism was heavily dependent on philosophy. Its emphasis on emotion and liberation (especially of cre- ative spirits) derived from Rousseau. Its notion of a higher, non-analytic kind of reason was taken from the post- Kantians, Fichte, and Schelling, most directly by Coleridge. Of romantic affiliation was Herder’s notion of the unique individuality of particular peoples. The nation- alism this implied was more aggressively affirmed by Fichte and bureaucratized by Hegel, with some marginal borrowings from Rousseau and Burke. The way was prepared for the rampant nationalism of the nineteenth century and the erosion of dynastic absolutism. In Britain, where national identity had been assured, with some help from geography, for 400 years, the emphasis was on reform, intensified by the effects of philosophy, the influence of 709 . truth, other substantive theories being the *coherence theory, the *pragmatic theory, and the *semantic theory, while other deflationary theories include the prosentential theory and the performative. relations to one another; the events in their history, and thus change, and also the states which are the dull, and the processes which are the more eventful, parts of that history; the facts. existence from the world’s need of a first cause and from the marks of intelligent design in the order of the perceived world. Even more important for the his- tory of philosophy is Plato’s theory of