The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 74 ppt

urbanization and the growth of industry. The *utilitarian- ism of Bentham and the Mills discarded the natural-rights liberalism of Locke and reached back to the starker doctrines of Hobbes and Hume. Marx depended on Hegel, even if he turned him upside-down, basing history on man’s material and economic life rather than on the progress of Spirit. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche rejected the rational optimism of the Enlightenment, respectively accepting and glorifying the will and preparing the way for all kinds of anti-rational excess in belief and practice. In the wasteland of modernity a host of belief systems largely untouched by philosophy sprang up, like the orien- tal religions of imperial Rome: *fascism, nudism, *vegetar- ianism, parapsychology, environmentalism. *Feminism broke away from its demure nineteenth-century liberal form, along with parallel movements for the emancipa- tion of homosexuals and animals. Psychiatry turned from Freud’s sombre recognition of the dependence of civiliza- tion on the control of instinct to ecstatic doctrines of the total liberation of impulse. If not inspired, all this was at least abetted by philosophies such as *existentialism and *post-structuralism which proclaimed the inescapable arbitrariness of choice, the death of man, and the inherent self-deceivingness of any kind of rationalism. English- speaking analytic philosophers, notably Russell and Pop- per, both widely read by non-philosophers, sustained the battered programme of the Enlightenment, arguing for the continuing liberalization of constraining institutions: education, marriage, property, and the state. a.q. *philosopher may preach; pseudo-philosophy; Marxist philosophy; Platonism; Thomism. philosophy, maps of: see Appendix. philosophy, popular: see popular philosophy. philosophy, pseudo-: see pseudo-philosophy. philosophy, radical: see radical philosophy. philosophy, teaching: see teaching philosophy. philosophy, the value and use of. The direct value and use of philosophy is either intrinsic or educational. Intrin- sically it satisfies, or seeks to satisfy, the intellectual desire for comprehensive knowledge or understanding. We approach the world and the management of our lives within it with a miscellany of more or less unconnected beliefs, preferences, and habits of action, largely acquired from or imposed by others. There is a natural, if by no means universal, desire to order this material systemat- ically, to find out how all the bits and pieces fit together, and to achieve theoretical and practical autonomy by a critical sifting and purification of the beliefs and preferences with which we find ourselves equipped. To be philosophically inclined is to want to make one’s convic- tions systematic and authorized by ourselves by way of critical reflection on what we might otherwise take for granted. It is to pursue a rationally founded conception of the world and system of values and, as a pre-condition of that, an understanding of what we really know or have good reason to believe. That is an idealized picture, no doubt, but it defines the intrinsic value and use of philosophy in terms of its aims, if not altogether in terms of what is achieved. Educationally the direct value and use of philosophy is its emphasis on *argument or *reasoning. These are to be found, of course, in the study of any intellectual discipline, pretty much by definition. But the proportion of argument to data argued from is much higher than in any other study, apart from mathematics. And the data of philosophy are much more concrete and various in kind than those of mathematics. Philosophy starts from the com- monest and most elemental items of common knowledge: that there are material things, past events, and other people, and that we have, or seem to have, knowledge of them. It goes on to ask whether that is so and what is required if our supposed knowledge is to be possible. Phil- osophy can claim, on this account, to be a good training in self-critical rationality and a valuable accompaniment to any study in which reasoning plays an important part, but is not explicitly reflected on. In so far as the study of philosophy includes the study of its history it can provide some acquaintance with the overall shape of the large movements of the mind in history. It often does this badly by disconnecting past philosophers from each other and from their intellectual environment. Philosophy also has indirect uses. The most important of these has been that of first nurturing and then setting free other disciplines (often with a familiar kind of parental reluctance and retentiveness). Physics and mathematics proper (as distinct from mere reckoning in trade or sur- veying) derived from early Greek cosmology. Christian theology, in successive phases, was the child of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. Scientific psychology and economics developed from associationist and utilitarian philosophies of mind and action. Jurisprudence emerged from various kinds of political philosophy (from the Stoics, Bacon, and Hobbes), as did political science. Philosophy at least played some part in the transformation of history from mere chronicle into explanatory narrative and has tempted it at times into metahistorical system- atization of history as a whole. In the present epoch linguistics has largely extricated itself from the maternal embrace of philosophy. Finally, philosophy, in a popular sense of the word, has aimed to satisfy a widespread popular need, typically by way of guidance in the conduct of life (from Socrates, the Stoics, and the Epicureans onward) or, where there is no scope for guidance, as with the inevitability of death and other blows of misfortune, by way of consolation, for the most part more austerely than religion does. (*Popular philosophy.) a.q. *Lumber of the Schools; bladders of philosophy; divine philosophy; fingering slave; clip an angel’s wings. 710 philosophy, the influence of philosophy, women in: see women in philosophy. philosophy and literature: see literature and philosophy. philosophy and ordinary language: see ordinary language and philosophy. philosophy and psychology: see psychology and philosophy. philosophy and real life. Claims by one philosophical tradition to capture real life better than another presuppose further claims concerning what it is about reality that philosophy should aim to capture. Traditional metaphysics bears the mark of *Parmenides’ conclusion that there is no real change in the world. In the light of the One, the life that does change is lost to view or dismissed as illusory. The complaint that philosophy has treated its questions at too abstract a level is often laid at the door of *Plato’s appropriation of *Socrates, for whom philosophy was an activity designed educatively to recast questions rather than provide any answers. When *Kierkegaard asked his philosophy teacher what relation philosophy had to actual life, it was with the thought that this long-standing trend should be reversed. That philosophical questioning begins with the ‘existing’ individual is the view of existen- tialists, whose reaction to the tradition culminating in *Hegel was led by Kierkegaard himself. Whereas he focused on philosophers’ attempts to capture within a closed system something that is essentially open-ended, later critics were concerned to replace the traditional vocabulary with one that better maps the contours of life as it is lived. *Existentialism thus re-situated philosophy by replacing its impersonal viewpoint with a subjective one, and the methods of philosophical reasoning with a descriptive approach claiming to do better justice to life itself. Some *linguistic philosophy may be said to be informed by a similar aim. This shift of viewpoint contrasts with *Marxist philosophy’s quasi-scientific socio- economic focus and with the generalizing tendencies of philosophical *anthropology, but also with the approach of ‘applied’ philosophy which focuses on the ethical dilemmas of professional and political life. Employing traditional methods of reasoning, this draws on an armoury established by philosophy’s recent analytic past and on standard versions of the more enduring moral theories. Apart from generating large and specialized litera- tures, *bioethics and *business ethics have contributed to a public image of the philosopher as a professional among others, and of philosophy itself as a service industry of use in formulating guide-lines for ethically acceptable behav- iour. In this endeavour what counts is less any special philosophical insight than an ability inherited from analytic philosophy to give debates a manageable and surveyable form. a.h. J. Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life (London, 2003). A. Hannay, ‘What Can Philosophers Contribute to Social Ethics?’, Topoi (1998). D. Moran and T. Mooney (eds.), The Phenomenology Reader (Lon- don, 2002). philosophy and science. How are *philosophy and science related to one another? I. It has often been claimed that the method of reasoning adopted by modern science is the method of reasoning that philosophy should also adopt in dealing with at least some of its problems. Thus Hume subtitled his Treatise of Human Nature ‘An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects’. It was as if he took his sceptical philosophy to be a pioneering contribu- tion to what we should now call experimental psychology. Similarly on Quine’s view, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York, 1969), 82–3, epistemology should be regarded ‘as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science’ because it studies ‘a natural phenom- enon’. Specifically, according to Quine, it studies a physical human subject that receives as input a sequence of patterns of irradiation in assorted frequencies and delivers as output a description of the three-dimensional external world and its history. We need to ask the following question, however: how much of the procedures adopted by physicists, chemists, biologists, etc., since ad 1600 or thereabouts is to count here as a part of the method of natural science? Kant described himself, in the preface to the second edition of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (tr. N. Kemp Smith (London, 1929)), 21–3, as seeking to put metaphysics ‘on the sure path of a science’. He thought that via his critical method metaphysics could achieve the same level of consensual certainty as that which was supposed to belong to the mathematics and physics of his time. In the reformed metaphysics it would no longer be possible to construct pairs of arguments that were both apparently sound yet had mutually opposed conclusions. But this would not make metaphysics a branch of mathematics or physics. Similarly Russell held, in his History of Western Philosophy (London, 1946), 862–4, that in the practice of philosophical analysis (as, for example, in his own philosophy of mathematics) a method of procedure is used that resem- bles scientific reasoning in respect of its ability to achieve definite, consensually acceptable answers for certain problems and therewith successive approximations to the understanding of a whole field of inquiry. But Russell’s claim was not as bold as that of Hume and Quine. In particular he did not share their view that the extent of the resemblance between philosophical and scientific method included a shared use of controlled experiment and observation. Popper too has theorized, in his Conjectures and Refutations (London, 1963), 198–200, that like any science philosophy must first proceed by the isolation of a problem and then by the proposal and criticism of a hypothesis for the problem’s solution. But he does not expect an epistemological theory of this nature to be empirically refutable. How could he expect it to be empirically refutable if the subject-matter that might refute it does not belong either to the mental or to the physical world but to philosophy and science 711 what, in Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford, 1972), 107–9, he calls ‘the third world . . . of problems, theories and arguments’? Again Comte, in his Cours de philosophie positive (Paris, 1830), i. 2–56, held it to be a fundamental law of mental development that both com- munities and individuals pass from a ‘theological or ficti- tious state’ into a ‘metaphysical or abstract state’ and from the latter into a ‘scientific or positive’ one. And it is from Comte’s use of the term ‘positive’ in this connection that *‘positivism’ has come to be the name given to any philosophical theory that assigns a dominant intellectual role to empirical science. But Comte’s view was that metaphysical thinking should be replaced by scientific thinking, not that metaphysical thinking should consist in a kind of scientific thinking. Many philosophers have implicitly or explicitly rejected any such scientistic paradigm. Certainly the sceptical tradition cannot easily be reconciled with this conception of philosophy. If you deny that knowledge is possible, then a fortiori you deny that any paradigm of knowledge exists. If genuine science is beyond human capacity, it is pointless to urge philosophers to imitate it. Indeed, when Socrates claimed to know nothing but his own ignorance, he was scorning those of his contemporaries who claimed to know more than this. Nor can philosophy stand in unbiased judgement over the principles and assumptions of the sciences if it is itself one of them: for example, in Plato’s Republic, book 7, the author’s conception of philosophy—under the name of *‘dialectic’—as an architectonic discipline left no room for it to take geometry, arithmetic, or one of the other sciences as its paradigm. Moreover, against Russell’s thesis that philosophy should proceed like a science, there stands the emphasis placed by some other analytical philosophers, like Ayer in his Language, Truth and Logic (London, 1946), 33–70, on the importance of the difference between *analytic and synthetic propositions, with the conclusions of philosophical inquiry being said to be characteristically analytic while the conclusions of physical, chemical, or biological inquiry are said to be characteristically synthetic. The former articulate the implications of a word’s or phrase’s meaning; the latter describe features of objects. And, whereas scientific conclusions need always to be based on valid reasoning from appropriate premisses, there are philosophers, like Samuel Alexander and Derrida, who purport to spurn all attempts at philosophical reasoning. Alexander claimed, in his ‘Some Explanations’, Mind (1931), 423, to ‘dislike argument’. And Derrida has said, in ‘Limited Inc abc’, Glyph (1977), supplement, 56, that he detests discussion, subtleties, and ratiocinations. II. In the face of so much disagreement the best way forward is to seek out those features in which philosophy does seem to resemble a natural or social science and those in which it does not. For example, it is scarcely to be denied, even if it verges on platitude to assert, that both types of inquiry involve the solution of intellectual problems. In particular cases they may involve the solution of practical problems also, but this is not a necessary feature. On the one side, for a scientist, to know what causes a given process is very often also to know how to produce it. But practical knowledge does not accompany theoretical if the process caused is the explosion of a supernova. On the other side, if as a philosopher one accepts an appropriate type of analysis of *personal identity, one may have acquired thereby the ability to reconcile oneself to a loved one’s apparent death. Per- haps people are really immortal, so that reflection on the relevant philosophical analysis provides a technology of consolation. But others who accept the same analysis may nevertheless be inconsolable. A well-constructed analysis of logical entailment may assist the task of persuading someone to acknowledge the validity of a long and subtle argument. But others may still be unable to grasp it. Again, the results of scientific inquiry are always expected to be consistent with one another overall, and so too are the results of philosophical inquiry. In either case any inconsistency is regarded as a fault or inadequacy, and functions as a sign of where more work needs to be done. More interestingly, perhaps, it is worth noting that, as in science, so too in philosophy both deductive and inductive patterns of argument are to be found. Thus on the one hand Descartes, in his Discours de la methode (Leiden, 1637), part v, sought to deduce the existence of God from certain self-evident first principles, and Ryle, in The Concept of Mind (London, 1949), 8, claimed to be mainly using *reduc- tio ad absurdum arguments. On the other hand the movement of philosophical thought is often inductive rather than deductive. This occurs when the validity of some general principle is supported by an appeal to involuntary intuition in a particular kind of case. For example, Bernard Williams, in his ‘Moral Luck’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1976), 117 ff., declares that his ‘procedure in general will be to invite reflection about how to think and feel about some rather less usual situation, in the light of an appeal to how we—many people—tend to think about other more usual situations’. Again Quine, for example in his Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 157–61, defends his hostility to logical modalities, intentional objects, and subjunctive conditionals by appeals to the logical intuitions that this or that utterance may provoke. And Putnam, in his ‘Mind, Language and Reality’, in Philo- sophical Papers (Cambridge, 1975), ii. 224, tells a science- fiction story to evoke an intuition about the use of the term ‘water’ on a look-alike planet earth in order to support the thesis that the meaning of a scientific term is never just a function of the speaker’s psychological state. Important features of dissimilarity, however, are also to be found. In science the data that support inductive conclusions are data that emerge, albeit involuntarily, from experiment or observation, not from intuition or intellectual conscience. Correspondingly, whatever the field of their research, scientists are expected to achieve consensus, and the history of modern science is full of such achievement. 712 philosophy and science Moreover, this expectation is embodied in accepted patterns of institutional endorsement, i.e. in the publication of universally respected textbooks, in elections to official academies, and so on. Nor could science progress through teamwork, as it often does, unless consensus were the norm. But, where two philosophical theories oppose one another, that opposition is not necessarily seen as showing that one or both of the theories must be faulty. In this way philosophy is perhaps more like art than like science. An art gallery is the richer for the fact that it possesses paintings in the realist style as well as in the impressionist one. Our culture also profits analogously from the opposition between philosophical realism and philosophical idealism, albeit philosophical theories are constructed with the help of language and argument, not of canvas and paint, and convey an outlook on intellectual or social issues, not on visual ones. Moreover, philosophy often has a normative aspect, which science lacks. Thus scientists set out to describe some aspect of how the world is, or of why it is so, or of what can be done to change it. But philosophers often set up ideals of how intellectual inquiry should proceed, or of what rationality requires, or of which socio-economic objectives should animate legislation. Roughly, while science can often supply knowledge of means, it is for philosophy to discuss the choice of fundamental ends. III. Despite the important differences that exist between science and philosophy, each has had an important influence on the other. For example, the readiness of philosophers to question any customary assumption, or to explore any interesting speculation, has sometimes helped to open up new avenues of scientific inquiry or to provoke major revolutions in scientific theory. Empiricist theories of meaning, like Hume’s, when mediated through the work of Mach, had a part in creating the climate of ideas in which it was possible for Einstein to regard the concept of absolute simultaneity as meaning- less. Truth-functional analyses of implication, like the Stoics’, are ancestors, via Boole’s mathematical logic, of the systems of logic-gates that are essential to digital com- puters. But there is also the possibility that interest in methodological or epistemological problems may sometimes divert a scientist—especially a young and inexperi- enced one—from working on substantive scientific issues. Conversely, major new developments in science tend to pose new problems for philosophers. Thus the triumph of quantum theory in physics sets new puzzles for those who investigate the structure of scientific explanation, since familiar deterministic assumptions seem no longer tenable. And new medical technology has generated many new problems in medical ethics with regard to the use of life-support mechanisms, organ transplants, experi- mentation on patients, choice of an infant’s sex, etc. Moreover, in addition to such interconnections between particular scientific developments and particular philosophical ones, the general notion of scientific progress has also been linked—sometimes positively and sometimes negatively—with philosophical attitudes. Thus Utilitarians like John Stuart Mill have looked to science for a technology of happiness and have therefore been especially keen that the social sciences should emu- late, wherever possible, the style and method of the natural sciences and attain a comparable level of success at prediction and explanation. And even though a *deonto- logical ethics does not normally require assistance from science in order to achieve the realization of what it values, it does not repudiate such assistance either. Some philosophers, on the other hand, have actually adopted a negative attitude to science, or part of science, as normally conceived. Sometimes this attitude rests on the claim that a superior science is relevant, such as a philosophically argued metaphysics or a creationist alternative to Darwinian *biology. Sometimes it rests instead on the claim that modern science is itself to be blamed for all the environmental pollution that its users have generated. But neither claim is well founded. Not a single con- sequence of an alternative epistemology has ever been generally accepted by all those who repudiate or despise modern experimental science. And the sources of environmental pollution are all to be traced to the activities of those who misuse scientific knowledge, not to the activities of those who discover it. IV. Even if philosophy is not a kind of science, nor a rival of science, and even if it has had differences from science that are crucial to its nature, it may nevertheless be conve- niently thought of, like science, as a species of knowledge—the self-knowledge of reason. At least three kinds of knowledge are then recognized. Science gives us systematic, institutionally warranted, and technologically exploitable knowledge of the uniformities and probabil- ities in our natural and social environments. Everyday knowledge informs us about the immediately obvious features of the facts that confront us. And philosophy provides knowledge of the fundamental principles and assumptions in accordance with which we reason. It is that kind of knowledge which is provided when a paradox is discovered, discussed, and resolved; when some form of *scepticism is proposed or refuted; when the body–mind interconnection is investigated; when the nature of mathematical proof is clarified; when foundations of moral or aesthetic value are established; when the possibility of the world’s being subject to the control of an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent deity is examined; and so on. Against this view of the relationship between science and philosophy a number of objections may be urged. One possible objection is that belief is about matters of fact, as in science or everyday awareness, whereas philosophy is often concerned with rules, norms, values, or ideals. But again the premiss is false. Beliefs are not always about matters of fact. For example, one can claim to believe that a *modus ponens type of argument is necessarily valid or that children should be taught to read and write by the age of 7. philosophy and science 713 A second possible objection is that if philosophy does not, like science, aim at consensus it cannot be a species of knowledge. But there is a confusion here. Certainly it would be self-contradictory to say of one person that he knows that p and of another that he knows that not-p. But it is quite admissible to say of one person (whether in science, in everyday experience, or in philosophy) that he thinks that he knows that p and of another that he thinks that he knows that not-p—just as one painter or art critic may think that he knows the superiority of realism and another may think that he knows the superiority of impressionism. In other words to seek philosophical knowledge is to seek consensus, in that philosophers use argument in order to persuade one another of the correct- ness of their view. But a wise philosopher does not expect that philosophical consensus will ever be achieved, except locally and in the short run. So he does not expect that his arguments on a philosophical issue will be as cogent as those of a competent scientist on a scientific issue. Thirdly, it might be said that philosophy cannot be a species of knowledge that ought to be classified co-ordinately with scientific knowledge since a sufficiently advanced neuroscience, matching software to hardware, could itself provide consensual knowledge about the fundamental principles and assumptions in accordance with which we reason. In other words, it will be said, a sufficiently detailed knowledge of the human brain’s genetically controlled architecture will reveal the structure of our thinking ability. So philosophy is just a variety of scientific knowledge. But that is to suppose the existence of a fully determi- nate, genetically programmed system of principles and assumptions, with no room for major variation in accordance with cultural inheritance or individual choice. *Evolution would instead have given the human species a survivally more valuable endowment if the genetically programmed system constituted only a loose framework within which a variety of alternative patterns of reasoning were possible, with the choice or construction of a particular pattern being settled in accordance with the perceived needs of the situation. Thus it may be tempting to suppose, for example, that people have an innate ability, which a well-developed neurology could explain, to learn to calculate arithmetically in the scale of 10. But in fact the ancient Greeks and Romans, and early medieval Europeans, had no such ability because their arithmetic lacked the number 0. How are these vast areas of conceptual space, left neuro- logically indeterminate by genetic programmes, to be filled and used? Much of this great task is achieved by the unreflective endeavour of scientists or of intelligent people building on the inherited achievements of their forebears. But there is also room for philosophers to contribute through the critical and reflective exploration of alternative options. And neuroscience cannot take on this task because, even if a neuroscientist were able to detect the patterns of reasoning preferred by particular philosophers, he would still be left with the task of criticizing and evaluating those patterns. That is, he would still need, in important respects, to operate as a philosopher. l.j.c. *science, history of the philosophy of; science, problems of the philosophy of. J. Burnet, Greek Philosophy: Thales to Plato (London, 1914). E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (London, 1932). L. J. Cohen, The Dialogue of Reason (Oxford, 1986). R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford, 1940). T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford, 1986). M. Schlick, The Problems of Philosophy in their Interconnection (Dor- drecht, 1987). philosophy and theology: see theology and philosophy. philosophy and the public. In an old Monty Python sketch on television, two teams of philosophers play a football match. The German idealists are competing against a squad of ancient Greeks for an undisclosed hon- our. But the game is a disaster because all the players wad- dle around scratching their beards rather than engaging with the ball. Such is philosophy’s public image in Britain—philosophers are comic, their concerns inscrutable, and their capacity for recommending courses of action even to themselves terribly limited. To some members of the public, at least, philosophers remain as socially useless as Cratylus, the Hericlitean who found the world so perplexing that he was reduced to silently wag- ging a finger. Behind the satire, though, there is a real disappoint- ment that broadly empiricist philosophers seem tempera- mentally unable to answer purportedly profound and profoundly romantic philosophical questions that press themselves on the public—about the meaning of life, the nature of time, how to lead the good life. Even Stephen Hawking has rebuked philosophers for allegedly aban- doning the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant in favour of the mere analysis of meaning. Julian Baggini suggests that the public’s disappoint- ment in philosophers now stems from a misconception. ‘Carrying around some weird image of philosophers as New Age gurus or spiritual leaders, they don’t seem to realise that the vast majority of modern philosophy is technical, specialised and about as relevant to the concerns of everyday life as theoretical physics.’ No wonder, then, that anxious members of the public, seeking happiness or the meaning of life, take succour in glib answers to questions that some professional philosophers might regard as strictly senseless. The extent to which the public buys books by non-philosophers pur- porting to be philosophy, such as Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder or Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton, is perhaps a good measure of the need for such succour. Worse yet, traditionally philosophical problems have been appropriated in considerable measure by charismatic academics from other disciplines who have have achieved much public success with popular books. Thus the nature of time has been tackled by physicists, and 714 philosophy and science consciousness by evolutionary biologists and quantum theorists. Often such appropriations have been regarded as disastrous over-simplifications by professional philosophers. But when pitted against the showmanship of the evolutionary biologist Steven Pinker or the gusto of the zoologist Richard Dawkins, the compunctions of philosophers, and their concern that scientists’ answers sometimes elide what makes a particular problem fascinating or at least difficult, are likely to be about as compelling to the public as an all-philosophers’ football match. In part, philosophy’s public-relations problem is to do with the current dearth of philosophers who are good public performers. This is hardly a purely British problem, if it is a problem at all: the late John Rawls, for instance, was an impeccably reticent American academic, but in the age of the mass media this dignified reticence may well be taken as intolerable. Perhaps one thing that philosophy needs to improve its public image is a few charismatic monsters of egotism—a latter-day Russell, for instance— but monsters who are good on telly. This PR problem applies primarily to anglophone philosophy. In France, to take one example, deference to philosophers is such that Pythonesque satire is all but inconceivable. One might well ask why. An answer might well take in the following points. In France, there is a tradition of the philosophe engagé, one who gets rather noisily involved in public affairs and who can perform his or her thoughts compellingly in newspapers or on TV. One need only think of Sartre or Bernard-Henri Lévy to get the idea. Across the Channel, too, philosophical work, such as it is, often has a romantic tenor that is publicly compelling. It may well be seductive to the public that Heidegger dealt with the question of being, a matter of great pomp and mystique; rather less sexy is an anglophone analytical philosophy that deals with questions of meaning. And yet, even when a continental philosopher such as Jacques Der- rida engages with what are primarily linguistic matters, his tilting at the windmills of meaning has a romantic flourish that makes what he does publicly appealing and superficially comprehensible. Everyone thinks they know what he means by ‘deconstruction’, and many suppose it to be a grand philosophical project of the kind that anglophone empiricists seem incapable of pursuing. What future for anglophone philosophers seeking a public role? One suggestion is that they can serve as intellectual firefighters, called in to quell blazing rows that are the result of muddled thinking or sloppy arguments over such issues as abortion, euthanasia, cloning, and war. Whether there is a public demand for them to perform this role is questionable. s.j. Julian Baggini, Making Sense: Philosophy behind the Headlines (Lon- don, 2002). Alain de Botton, Consolations of Philosophy (London, 2002). Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge, 1981). Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World, tr. Paulette Moller (London, 1996). Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (London, 1988). Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London, 1946). philosophy and war: see war and philosophy. philosophy of education: see education, history of the philosophy of; education, problems of the philosophy of. philosophy of history: see history, history of the philosophy of; history, problems of the philosophy of. philosophy of language: see language, history of the philosophy of; language, problems of the philosophy of. philosophy of law: see law, history of the philosophy of; law, problems of the philosophy of. philosophy of life: see life, philosophy of. philosophy of mathematics: see mathematics, history of the philosophy of; mathematics, problems of the philosophy of. philosophy of mind: see mind, history of the philosophy of; mind, problems of the philosophy of. philosophy of religion: see religion, history of the philosophy of; religion, problems of the philosophy of. philosophy of science: see science, history of the philosophy of; science, problems of the philosophy of. philosophy of social science: see social science, philosophy of. philosophy: world and underworld. Ideas which either violate important canons of reasoning or which are simply far out and unfamiliar are frowned upon by some philosophers and are assigned by them to a philosophical underworld. Examples are concerns about black and white magic, revivals of alchemical and occult systems, off- shoots of psychoanalysis and of C. G. Jung’s psychology, large parts of New Age thinking, certain versions of feminism, general views surrounding astrology, unclear ideas proposed by scientists (Bohr’s idea of complementarity or Kuhn’s idea of incommensurability), and so on. However, speaking of an underworld of *philosophy assumes that there is a world of philosophy, i.e. a well- defined and more or less uniform domain of discourse and/or activity. Such worlds do indeed exist. Every school of philosophy that has not yet started falling apart has the unity required by the assumption. But it seems doubtful that the collection of all schools, at all times and in all places, or even the sum total of today’s philosophy depart- ments at Western universities shares ideas and standards that are sufficiently substantial to define a world and a cor- responding underworld. We have no comprehensive studies of the matter; however, there exists strong anecdotal evidence undermining any sort of uniformity. No self-respecting British philosopher would try to revive the idea, found in Augustine, that the harmonious musical intervals represent truth in a way philosophy: world and underworld 715 inaccessible to human reason. The Herder of the Ideen was beyond the pale for Kant, Kant for the Nietzsche of the Antichrist, Hegel for Schopenhauer, the Wittgenstein of the Investigations for Russell, Tarski for the Wittgenstein of the Investigations, and all of traditional philosophy for the founders of the Vienna Circle and the practitioners of deconstruction. All these ideas are now held (by Anglo- American philosophers) to belong to philosophy proper and are deposited in its history. Making them measures of philosophical excellence we obtain an ‘underworld’ devoid of content. And this is exactly as it ought to be. Both in the West and elsewhere philosophy started out as a universal criticism of earlier views (in Greece the earlier views were those of the Homeric epics). The gradual subdivision of research and its professionalization left philosophers with two options: to become specialists themselves or to con- tinue dealing with and being nourished by all human ideas, efforts, procedures. In the first case we do get underworlds—but there will be different underworlds for different schools (in the sciences the situation is the same; molecular biologists have an underworld that differs from that of, say, cosmologists and certainly from the underworld of some sociological schools). An honest professional philosopher would therefore say: ‘Being a positivist [for example] I reject Jung’s idea of a collective uncon- scious’ and not: ‘Jung is philosophically absurd’. In the second case we move beyond the domain of academic philosophy into a form of life that excludes nothing though it does not hesitate to make definite suggestions for definite occasions. p.k.f. *pseudo-philosophy. phrastic: see neustic and phrastic. phrone¯sis. Practical *wisdom. In ancient Greek the term (frequently interchangeable with sophia) has connotations of intelligence and soundness of judgement, especially in practical contexts. In Aristotle’s ethics it is the complete excellence of the practical intellect, the counterpart of sophia in the theoretical sphere, comprising a true conception of the good life and the deliberative excellence necessary to realize that conception in practice via choice (prohairesis). c.c.w.t. R. Sorabji, ‘Aristotle on the Rôle of the Intellect in Virtue’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1973–4); repr. in A. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (Berkeley, Calif., 1980). physicalism. The doctrine that everything is physical. Also called *materialism, the view is associated with Dem- ocritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Hobbes, Holbach, T. H. Huxley, J. B. Watson, Carnap, Quine, and Smart. Phys- icalists hold that the real world contains nothing but matter and energy, and that objects have only physical properties, such as spatio-temporal position, mass, size, shape, motion, hardness, electrical charge, magnetism, and gravity. Exceptions are sometimes made for *abstract entities such as numbers, sets, and propositions. The principal argument for physicalism is the success of physics. Physicists have been able to explain a large and diverse range of phenomena in terms of a few fundamental physical laws. The principle that the properties of larger objects are determined by those of their physical parts is confirmed daily. The physical basis of celestial phenomena was recognized in the seventeenth century, that of chemistry in the eighteenth, and of biology in the nineteenth. The neurophysiological basis of psychology has become increasingly apparent in the twentieth century. The principal objections to physicalism have come from theology, epistemology, and psychology. Theological objections stem from the widespread belief in supernat- ural, immaterial gods, and in special creation and life after death. Epistemological objections come from idealist or phenomenalist philosophers such as Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Mill, who hold that our ideas or sense- data are the only objects of direct perception, from which they conclude that everything must reduce to the mental. Psychological objections have been especially acute since Descartes, whose *dualism still has many vigorous adher- ents. The basic objection is that thinking, emotions, and sensations seem utterly unlike length, mass, and gravity. And physiologists are far from specifying neural states perfectly correlated with even one mental state. Physicalists respond either by denying the existence of the allegedly non-physical phenomena (*eliminative materialism), or by arguing that it must really be physical (reductive materialism; also *identity theory; *behaviourism; *central-state materialism). w.a.d. C. Gillett and B. Loewer (eds.), Physicalism and its Discontents (Cambridge, 2001). D. Hull, Philosophy of Biological Science (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1974). D. M. Rosenthal (ed.), The Nature of Mind (Oxford, 1991). physicalism in the philosophy of mind. Physicalism in the philosophy of mind is an application of the general metaphysical thesis of physicalism, namely the claim that everything in the space-time world is physical. Concern- ing the sphere of the mental, then, physicalism claims that all the facts about minds and mentality are physical facts. This claim is usefully divided into two parts: ontological physicalism, which holds that there are no mental particu- lars, all the individuals of this world being physical partic- ulars and their aggregates, and property physicalism, which holds that all properties of these individuals are physical properties. Ontological physicalism excludes such putative entities as immaterial souls, Cartesian mental substances, ‘entelechies’, and ‘vital forces’. If all physical entities (e.g. all physical particles) were taken away from this world, nothing would remain—not even an empty space-time framework. This contrasts with Cartesian substance dualism according to which minds are substances of a special kind and could in principle exist even if nothing material existed. Many ontological physicalists, however, reject the reductionist view that all properties had by physical 716 philosophy: world and underworld systems are exclusively physical properties; they hold the dualist thesis that complex physical structures, like biological organisms, can have irreducibly non-physical properties, such as *consciousness and *intentionality, two properties often taken to be constitutive of mentality. This is what is known as non-reductive physicalism, a position that combines physical monism with property dualism. In contrast, property physicalism, or reductive physicalism, holds that all properties of physical systems are either physical properties or reducible to them; that is, in so far as mental properties are genuine properties of physical systems, they must be reducible to physical properties. A general characterization of ‘physical property’ is a difficult, and controversial, matter; for the present purposes, we may skirt this general issue by taking as our paradigmatic physical properties the fundamental properties and magni- tudes of theoretical physics (e.g. mass, energy, charge) and properties definable or reducible in terms of them. *Emergentism is a form of non-reductive physicalism. On this view, when a physical structure reaches a certain level of structural complexity, it comes to exhibit novel, *emergent properties, most notably life and consciousness, whose occurrences are unpredictable and inexplic- able on the basis of its physical constituents and the laws that govern them. A majority of those who hold a func- tionalist view about mentality, too, think of themselves as non-reductive physicalists; for, according to them, mental properties and kinds are functional—perhaps computa- tional—properties and kinds defined in terms of input and output, not physico-chemical ones or biological ones. Non-reductive physicalism has been the most influential position on the *mind–body problem since the 1970s. However, it has recently come under attack by reductive physicalists on the ground that it is not able to account for mental causation, and that it supports an incorrect view of the interlevel relationships of the sciences. Most non-reductive physicalists acknowledge the priority of physical properties and physical laws, at least in the following sense (‘the *supervenience thesis’): the physical character of a thing determines its whole character, including its mental character. That is, there could not be two objects, or events, exactly alike in all physical respects and yet differing in some mental respect. The principal argument against reductive physicalism has been the *variable (or multiple) realizability of mental, and other higher-level, properties. Pain, for example, may be ‘realized’ in humans by the activation of C-fibres (let us say), but in different animal species (perhaps also in elec- tro-mechanical systems) we must expect different physical mechanisms to subserve pain. In fact, there may be no upper bound to the possible realizers of pain in all actual and possible systems. If this is true, pain cannot be identi- fied with any single physical kind. This point holds generally, it has been argued, for all higher-level properties, including biological properties in relation to physico- chemical properties. (See *functionalism; reductionism.) However, those who reject reductive physicalism for this reason, hold the thesis that mental and other higher- level properties can be realized only by physical properties. This view can be called ‘realization physicalism’, and it can explain why mind–body supervenience obtains; it entails that physically identical systems realize the same higher-level properties, including mental properties. Real- ization physicalism, even if it may fall short of full reductive physicalism, is a strong physicalism position. Another objection to reductive physicalism is based on the frankly dualist claim that, given their distinctively mental character, mental properties simply could not be physical properties. Even if, say, pain should turn out to have a single neural-physical correlate across all organisms and other possible pain-capable systems, how could the painful- ness of pain be a neurobiological property? In moving from the mental to the physical, we lose, it has been argued, what is mental about mental properties, such as their quali- tative character and their subjectivity. In this vein, it has been argued that for physicalism to be true, conscious events and processes must be shown not to be ‘over and above’ physical-biological processes, and that showing this requires showing that physical-biological facts of this world must logically entail facts about consciousness. But this cannot be shown, it has been argued in a manner rem- iniscent of the dualist arguments of Descartes, since we can perfectly well conceive of a world just like the actual world but one in which no consciousness exists and human-like creatures in it are mindless *‘zombies’, and hence such a world is a logically possible world. This argument remains highly controversial, however. j.k. *Mary, black and white. D. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (New York, 1996). J. Fodor, ‘Special Sciences, or the Disunity of Science as a Work- ing Hypothesis’, Synthese, 28 (1974). C. Gillett and B. Loewer (eds.), Physicalism and its Discontents (Cambridge, 2001). S. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass., 1980). D. Papineau, Thinking about Consciousness (Oxford, 2002). J. J. C. Smart, Philosophy and Scientific Realism (London, 1963). physics, philosophical problems of. Most of these are distinctly metaphysical, and arise from attempting to take seriously the picture of the world provided by modern physics. Typically what philosophers of physics do is to employ recent thinking in metaphysics, about the *identity of indiscernibles, *dispositions, *causality, *time, etc., to inform our understanding of modern physics—though they frequently argue for revising current metaphysical thought as well. However, philosophers of physics are also concerned with the more general epistemological problems of philosophy of science, like the underdetermin- ation of theory by empirical data or the status of unobservable entities. For such problems come into sharp focus when posed in the context of particular physical theories (e.g. string theory) or particular theoretical entities (e.g. quarks), bringing the hope that these problems may be better understood—perhaps even resolved. The involvement of philosophy in physics is not new. Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Mach, and Poincaré, to physics, philosophical problems of 717 name but a few classical physicists, all couched their ideas about the physical world in philosophical, as well as quan- titative, terms. But the intermingling of philosophy with physics has become even more apparent with the emer- gence of the kind of abstract theories that have come to dominate physics in this century. For example, as a prelude to establishing in his special theory of relativity that simultaneity is not an objective concept independent of an observer’s state of motion, Einstein needed to ‘clear the way’ by giving an epistemological critique of the methods observers can use to estab- lish whether spatially separated events are simultaneous. And Einstein cleared the way for his general theory of relativity by arguing (from the way that gravity affects objects independently of their size or make-up) that an object’s motion under gravity is indistinguishable from the motion it would be seen to have, in the absence of gravity, from the perspective of an observer accelerating past it (Einstein’s celebrated ‘principle of equivalence’). Similar epistemological critiques, for example of the procedures by which we can determine both the position and momentum of a particle (the *uncertainty principle), were formative in the early development of *quantum mechanics. In light of this, it is unfortunate that many physicists today regard philosophers as having little to contribute to the advance of physics; either because the problems that capture their attention are too mundane or idiosyncratic to be relevant, or because philosophers are perceived to lack the necessary mathematical training for settling fundamental issues. Nevertheless, the twentieth century has given rise to a ‘new breed’ of physically trained philosophers in close contact with the technical side of physics and how it affects philosophical issues: like how to reconcile the tendency of macroscopic systems to approach equilibrium over time with the underlying time-reversal invariance of physical laws; how to make sense of removing the infinities pre- dicted by quantum field theory by ‘renormalizing’; and whether a plausible formulation of the ‘cosmic censor- ship’ hypothesis holds true in general relativity so that *determinism can be safeguarded against naked singular- ities. Reichenbach was probably the first of this new breed, though since then the philosophers that immediately spring to mind are Earman, Fine, Grünbaum, Malament, Redhead, Shimony, Torretti, and van Fraassen. Two examples will serve to indicate the capacity modern physics has to impinge on both metaphysics and epistemology. Both examples will again be drawn from the special and general theories of *relativity (but *quantum mechanics is also relevant). The relativity of simultaneity in special relativity affects traditional metaphysical views about the nature of time; in particular, the view that only events occurring in the present (or past) are real, while events in the future are not yet ‘fixed’, or have yet to come into being. At the moment two observers in relative motion pass, their differing standards of simultaneity will force them to disagree on what events are in the ‘future’ and what are in the ‘past’. So, on the traditional view, they would have to disagree on which events are real, even when they (momentarily) occupy the same point in space! The obvious way to reinstate agreement is for the observers to say that only those events which can causally influence the event of the observers’ coincidence are real, since relativity predicts that both observers will necessarily agree on events those are. (*Space-time.) But this will now make what events are real dependent upon the particular spatial location of the observers’ coincidence! Hence some (e.g. Putnam) have argued that any objective, ontological distinction between ‘present’ (or ‘past’) and ‘future’ events must be abandoned. General relativity’s prediction that space can fail to obey the axioms of Euclidean geometry naturally leads to the epistemological question how we can know which geometry is applicable to our universe. Imagine a world of two- dimensional creatures confined to a flat disk of finite radius who are using measuring-rods to try and determine the geometry of their world. Suppose there is a temperature gradient on the disk which makes all measuring-rods expand or contract equally, with the gradient suitably arranged so that rods shrink to zero length as they approach the disk’s periphery. Then from their measure- ments the creatures will get the distinct impression that they live on a plane of infinite extent with a ‘Lobachevskian’ geometry. Of course, if they knew how the temperature of the disk was affecting their rods, the creatures could redescribe their situation as Euclidean. But since they are forever confined to the disk, there is no way of checking. So apparently they can either assume their instruments behave in a straight-forward way and adopt a more complicated geometry, or assume that the geometry is simply Euclidean and adopt a more complicated physical story about their expanding–contracting rods. Hence some (e.g. Poincaré and Reichenbach) have argued, using this disk parable, that which geometry is appropriate to our universe can only be a matter of convenience. r.cli. R. Boyd, P. Gasper, and J. D. Trout (eds.), The Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pt. ii, sect. 1: ‘The Philosophy of Physics’. M. Redhead, Physics for Pedestrians, Cambridge University Inaug- ural Lecture (Cambridge, 1988). —— From Physics to Metaphysics (Cambridge, 1993). L. Sklar, Philosophy of Physics (Boulder, Colo., 1992). Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni (1463–94). Italian philosopher who developed a form of syncretism according to which all systems of thought and belief could be reconciled on the basis of their shared truths. Although no philosophy or religion was entirely bereft of such truths, Christianity held a privileged position, acting as the standard by which all other truths were judged. At the age of 23 he challenged all comers to debate 900 Conclusiones embodying his attempts to reconcile such apparently incompatible trends of thought as Scotism and *Thomism, *Kabbalah and Christianity. The alleged 718 physics, philosophical problems of heterodoxy of some theses led to a papal condemnation and a brief period of imprisonment. His project to produce a full-scale harmonization of *Platonism and *Aris- totelianism was cut short by his early death, with only De Ente et Uno (1491), dealing with metaphysics, reaching completion. j.a.k. F. Roulier, Jean Pic de la Mirandole (1463–1494): Humaniste, philosophe et théologien (Geneva, 1989). picture theory of meaning. An account of the nature of *meaning central to Wittgenstein’s early philosophy, but which he later largely or entirely rejected. In attempting to understand the relation between language and world, Wittgenstein was struck by the analogy with picturing or modelling. Different coloured counters, variously arranged, might be used in a courtroom to model a motor- ing accident, for instance. Superficially, the counters may not resemble the physical objects they model, any more than propositions resemble the world; but propositions may still depict states of affairs, provided there are as many distinguishable elements within the proposition as within the situation it represents, so that the proposition possesses the appropriate pictorial form to be isomorphic to the state of affairs. Pictorial form may not be evident on the surface, but will always be revealable by deep analysis. j.l. L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with Eng. tr. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London, 1961). pictures. In aesthetics, following classical writers, a picture has been taken to be a mimesis, a *representation of reality. But the word ‘representation’ here at once suggests the question which has absorbed recent writers. Do pictures denote as sentences or words denote? If they do, they must do so through conventions. Or do pictures resemble their objects? Either view faces problems. Why do artists accept with alacrity a new way of painting a wheel in motion if the new device is merely conventional? If pictures represent because they resemble their objects, how can a picture represent a mythological being? Flint Schier proposed a theory which he describes as ‘generative’. Once you grasp that a picture represents the President then you can recognize the objects of any other pictures which use the same style of depiction. Thus we can then acquire a grasp of the method of representation from a single example; in this way learning to understand pictorial representation is quite unlike language-learning. r.a.s. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London, 1963). Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, 1985). Flint Schier, Deeper into Pictures (Cambridge, 1986). Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Washington, DC, 1987). piecemeal engineering. Popper thought that politics should proceed by piecemeal social engineering rather than by large-scale reform or revolution. Because any pol- icy will have unforeseen and often unintended conse- quences, we should only change institutions bit by bit and monitor carefully the effects of so doing. This is doubtless sensible advice, but regarding political activity purely in terms of piecemeal engineering presupposes a consensus on aims and goals not characteristic of pluralist societies. a.o’h. *conservatism; pluralism. K. R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (London, 1945). pietism. Pietism, the religion of Immanuel Kant, spring- ing from Lutheranism, influencing Wesley, and itself influenced by *Calvinism and the Mennonites, empha- sized conversion, salvation, and personal morality. In Pia Desiderata (1675) Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705) casti- gated corrupt conditions in the Church, and proposed various reforms. He and his followers were mocked as ‘pietists’, Spener said, by ‘those who feared through such holiness to have their own deeds put to shame’. j.j.m. D. Brown, Understanding Pietism (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1978). pineal gland. This small protrusion in the centre of the brain is, in Descartes’s notorious theory of mind–body interaction, singled out as the ‘principal seat of the soul’. When the gland is stimulated by the *animal spirits flow- ing through the nerves and brain, the soul residing in the gland will have a certain kind of sensation; conversely, when the soul wills a movement, it is able to transmit instructions to the body via the gland (Treatise on Man (1633)). Critics have standardly objected that positing a location for these supposed psychophysical transactions hardly removes the difficulty in seeing how an entirely immaterial substance can initiate, and respond to, physical thrusts. j.cot. Virgil Aldrich, ‘The Pineal Gland Updated’, Journal of Philosophy (1970); repr. in G. Moyal (ed.), René Descartes: Critical Assess- ments (London, 1991), iv. placebo. A pharmacologically inert substance adminis- tered blind to a control group as a way of testing the active substance as a treatment for illness. Allegedly, the patient’s belief in the effectiveness of a drug or treatment often brings about a cure or improvement in itself—the ‘placebo effect’. This creates a bind which calls out for philosophical therapy. There may be certain conditions (warts, say) where no treatments are effective unless the patient has faith in them. How can someone who recognizes this fact be cured? Suppose I am a warty sceptic who is realist enough to realize that if I firmly believe the warts will go, then they will. How can I cultivate that belief without sell- ing my critical soul? So far my consultants assure me I cannot avail myself of what may be the only known cure unless I surrender to irrationality. Know yourself and die! Whoever said rationality had survival value? j.e.r.s. plagiarism is not just a problem for university professors. It is the conceptual brother of *forgery: both are defined in terms of an artefact (e.g. a poem) not being genuine, but being represented as genuine, and so represented with the intention to deceive. Genuineness has to do with authorship, or source of issue, and, roughly speaking, the plagiarism 719 . see mathematics, history of the philosophy of; mathematics, problems of the philosophy of. philosophy of mind: see mind, history of the philosophy of; mind, problems of the philosophy of. philosophy. problems of the philosophy of. philosophy of law: see law, history of the philosophy of; law, problems of the philosophy of. philosophy of life: see life, philosophy of. philosophy of mathematics:. the philosophy of. philosophy of history: see history, history of the philosophy of; history, problems of the philosophy of. philosophy of language: see language, history of the philosophy