830 Russian philosophy work of the émigrés, the emergence of Russian post- modernism, and attempts to blend analytic philosophy with phenomenology and hermeneutics. Many new journals have sprung into existence, but Voprosy filosofii (Questions of Philosophy), founded in the 1940s, remains the leading philosophy publication in Russia. Under the editorship of V. A. Lektorsky (b. 1930), the journal negoti- ated the collapse of the old order to become a forum for many new developments and for the introduction of hitherto neglected fields, such as bioethics and philosophy of ecology. As well as spotlighting the work of formerly forbidden thinkers, the journal has sought to preserve the best of the Soviet era. The overarching concern of Russian philosophy is the quest for an all-embracing vision to facilitate the revital- ization, even divination, of humanity, so that human beings should be at one with each other and the world. Though the Communist version is no more, the aspir- ation for such a vision will no doubt continue to define the Russian tradition, which promises to remain as fascinating as it is distinct from the traditional concerns of English- speaking philosophy. d.bak. David Bakhurst, Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy (Cambridge, 1991). James M. Edie, James P. Scanlan, and Mary-Barbara Zeldin, Russian Philosophy, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1965). Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford, 1978), ii and iii. E. Lampert, Studies in Rebellion (London, 1957). —— Sons against Fathers (Oxford, 1965). James P. Scanlan, Marxism in the USSR (Ithaca, NY, 1985). A. Walicki, A History of Russian Thought (Oxford, 1980). Ryle, Gilbert (1900–76). Waynflete Professor of Meta- physical Philosophy and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford (1945–68), editor of the periodical Mind (1948–71). Probably the most conspicuous, fertile, and influential figure in a notably flourishing period of British phil- osophy, and in earlier years the chief instigator of the reanimation, particularly in Oxford, of the philosophical scene. His first efforts, in the 1920s, to ‘break the mould’ led him into the study of continental phenomenology; but by about 1930 he came to be preoccupied chiefly with the question what philosophy itself is. If it was, as he felt and found it to be, a live subject and not merely the scholarly study of classical texts, what were its problems? What was it about? What would be distinctively philosophical methods? His first thought was that philosophy investigates the meaning of expressions—a thought close to the idea (compare G. E. Moore and *Logical Positivism) that phil- osophy’s proper business is *‘analysis’. But philosophy surely is not mere lexicography; and, further, in what cases is ‘analysis’ philosophically called for? Ryle came to the conclusion, substantially never abandoned, that the philosopher’s business is not directly with meanings but rather with a certain kind of meaninglessness—not with what expressions mean, but with why certain combin- ations of expressions make no sense. Characteristic of his early work is the paper ‘Systematically Misleading Expres- sions’ (1932), which argues that some quite ordinary forms of expression are ‘improper’ to the states of affairs they record, invite thereby misassimilation to other forms of expression, and so tend to generate perplexity, even flat nonsense, from which it is the business of philosophical argument to rescue us. Soon thereafter, notably in his paper ‘Categories’ (1938), Ryle abandoned the rather obscure notion of an expression’s being ‘improper’ to a state of affairs in favour of the thesis that expressions can be grouped into ‘types’ or ‘categories’, and that philosophical trouble arises from attempting to handle an expression of one *category as if it belonged to another. On this view the source of trouble is a ‘category mistake’; the curative work of philosophy is to exhibit and correct categorial misassignments, it being dis- tinctive of such misassignment that it results in a ‘certain kind’ of meaninglessness or, as Ryle also often put it, of ‘absurdity’. This programmatic notion is famously and extensively pursued in his major work The Concept of Mind (1949), an impressive but perhaps not wholly coherent book. Its milder thesis is that the many and various ways we speak about ‘the *mind’ are potentially misleading; that philoso- phers, particularly those Ryle calls ‘the Cartesians’, have been misled; and that they have been misled in particular into picturing the mind as a ghostly counterpart of the body, a non-physical ‘thing’ mysteriously ‘in’ the physical body, and the scene or agent of non-physical states, hap- penings, and acts. There constantly obtrudes, however, a more extreme, apparently ontological thesis, that, con- trary to what ordinary ways of speaking suggest, there really are only physical objects and physical happenings, and that all talk seemingly ‘about’ minds is really no more than a certain way of talking about bodies. Ryle often denied, and critics often asserted, that his book preached *behaviourism. The fact is that it both did and did not, in different passages. Ryle was sometimes regarded as a man of this one book, The Concept of Mind; but that dismissive suggestion could not survive the publication of his two-volume Collected Papers (1971)—fifty-seven articles (to which he later added a few more) over a period of fifty years, which leave few areas of philosophy untouched and unenlivened. Dilemmas (1954) and Plato’s Progress (1966) should also be mentioned. g.j.w. *ghost in the machine. W. Lyons, Gilbert Ryle: An Introduction to his Philosophy (Brighton, 1980). O. P. Wood and G. W. Pitcher (eds.), Ryle: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York, 1970). Saadiah Gaon (882–942). Philosopher, exegete, Hebrew grammarian and lexicographer, liturgist, translator of much of the Hebrew Bible into Arabic. Born in Egypt, Saadiah became head (Gaon, lit. ‘eminence’) of the ancient Talmudic Academy located by his time in Baghdad. The first systematic work of Jewish philosophy, his Book of Crit- ically Chosen Beliefs and Convictions, the book commonly known as The Book of Beliefs and Opinions or Sefer Emunot ve-De‘ol, more properly, Sefer ha-Nivhar ba-Emunot ve-De‘ol, defends creation, revelation, and a carefully balanced eth- ical pluralism, explains providence and the afterlife, and refutes *scepticism, *relativism, and dogmatism. Saadiah works inductively from Scripture, using philological tech- niques developed after the translation of Greek works into Arabic. He favours the familiar sense of biblical expres- sions, except where reason, experience, authentic trad- ition, or another scriptural text preclude it. Then a figurative usage must be found and warranted by tight textual parallels. An intuitive psychologist, Saadiah rejects asceticism for the morbid and misanthropic mood it engenders. His aesthetics celebrates contrast and diver- sity, arguing (as against the monism of Plotinus’ account of beauty) that God is one, but we humans are multifold and diverse. l.e.g. Saadiah, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, tr. S. Rosenblatt (New Haven, Conn., 1948). —— The Book of Theodicy (Commentary on the Book of Job), tr. L. E. Goodman (New Haven, Conn., 1988). sacred: see holy, numinous, and sacred. Sainsbury, Mark (1943– ). English philosopher, at London and Austin, Texas, specializing in philosophical logic and the history of analytic philosophy. In particular he has devel- oped the view that truth has degrees and that objects can be inherently vague: the border between a mountain and its plain is fuzzy, but so is the border between the mountain and that fuzzy region, and the border between the moun- tain and this new fuzzy region, and so on. The statement that a certain point is on the mountain may therefore be true to a certain degree, where this does not mean it has some true parts and some false parts. (Paradox of the *heap.) However, this still implies a sharp trichotomy between def- initely true, intermediate (of whatever degree), and definitely false. He has therefore developed more recently a revised view whereby concepts, including those of truth and falsity, no longer have boundaries. a.r.l. *Russell. R. M. Sainsbury, Paradoxes (Cambridge, 1988). —— Departing from Frege (London, 2002). Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de (1760–1825). The father of French *socialism, Saint-Simon was an ardent enthusiast for the philosophy of *progress, providing the (French) link between the *philosophes of the eighteenth century and the science and technology progressionists of the nineteenth, especially Comte, his sometime disciple and collaborator. Saint-Simon worked out his position essentially on the basis of one case, namely the rise of modern society from the feudal system of the Middle Ages. In common with many who had lived through the French Revolution, Saint-Simon did not want to deny absolutely the virtues and stability of traditional Christianity; but he saw all such societies as having the seeds of their own decay, as they fail to speak to the needs of the economic and socially dominant classes. Post- medieval Europe was a tale of the rise of independent pro- ducers and merchants, conflict with the established powers, and uneasy resolution of the struggle. That these ideas sound familiar is a direct result of their influence on Marx. m.r. F. E. Manuel, The New World of Saint-Simon (Cambridge, Mass., 1956). C H. Saint-Simon, Selected Writings, tr. F. M. H. Markam (Oxford, 1952). Salmon, Wesley (1925–2001). US philosopher of science, who devoted most of his attention to scientific explanation and the epistemology of science. Salmon rejected the Log- ical Positivist doctrine that the adequacy of an *explan- ation depends upon whether what is to be explained can be deduced (the ‘deductive-nomological’ account) or is inductively inferrable (the ‘inductive-statistical’ account) from the explanation. He first proposed that explaining an occurrence is a matter of finding factors which are statistic- ally relevant to it (the ‘statistical relevance’ account), and later required in addition that the explanation must show the place of the occurrence in a system of real-world causal S processes and interactions (the ‘causal– Mechanical’ account). His epistemological studies apply Bayesian prob- ability to traditional problems in confirmation. Salmon also worked on issues connected with space, time, and motion, as well as a variety of historical topics. j.b.b. *Bayesian confirmation theory. Wesley C. Salmon, Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World (Princeton, NJ, 1984). —— Causality and Explanation (New York, 1998). salva veritate . Literally, ‘without loss of truth’. A rule of *inference must be truth-preserving: it must take one from truths to truths. (*Validity.) Questions arise concerning a rule of the predicate cal- culus with identity which reflects a principle attributed to Leibniz, who asserted that if a and b are the same, what is true of a is true of b. The rule of the calculus is: From (a=b) and Φ infer Ψ, where ‘Ψ’ is like ‘Φ’ except that ‘a’ and ‘b’ have been exchanged at one or more places. The rule seems to support substitutions that cannot be made salva veritate in some contexts, such as those involv- ing *propositional attitudes. Such contexts have been des- ignated as indirect or *referentially opaque. r.b.m. R. Barcan Marcus, ‘Does the Principle of Substitutivity Rest on a Mistake?’, in Modalities (Oxford, 1993). W. V. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass., 1953, 1961, 1980). S ´ an . kara (788–820 ad). Philosopher-monk, founder of non-dualist *Veda¯nta. In his fiercely polemical commen- taries on the *Upanishads and Brahma Su¯tras,S ´ an . kara rejects both pluralistic realism and subjective idealism. Using *‘third-man’-type regress arguments against causal, mereological, intentional, or any other kind of relation or difference, he seeks to show the manifold world of change to be neither real nor unreal. It is a dream like superimpos- ition of contents projected by the veil of ignorance on pure unobjectified consciousness. This consciousness is the one reality behind both God (Brahman), who became the world, and the individual (A ¯ tman). Unlike a dream-world which is nullified by ‘practically true’ wakeful experience, the world-appearance is dispelled only by a direct mystical dawning of the ‘transcendentally true’ oneness indicated by such scriptural sentences as ‘You are that’ and ‘All this is Brahman’. a.c. Kari Potter (ed.), Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, iii: Advaita Vedanta (Princeton, NJ, 1982). samples, explanation by. According to Wittgenstein, a subcategory of ostensive explanations of word-meaning involves explanation by reference to a paradigmatic sam- ple. Names of perceptual properties (e.g. colour-words), lengths (e.g. ‘metre’), or weights (e.g. ‘kilogram’), are (or were) introduced thus. The sample is not the property pointed at, but the object (the patch on the colour chart, or the metal rod) that fulfils the canonical role in the practice of using the word. Whether something is a sample is not an intrinsic property of an object, but a matter of its use as a standard for the correct application of the definiendum. Hence something can be a sample only if it satisfies the con- ditions for such use, e.g. relative permanence or repro- ducibility, reidentifiability, comparability with objects that can truly or falsely be said to instantiate the feature defined. Associated with each defining sample is a method of comparison involved in the practice of its use. Hence sub- jective sensations, e.g. pain, cannot fulfil the role of defining samples in a ‘private ostensive definition’. What were sometimes thought to be synthetic a priori truths, e.g. that black is darker than white, or that nothing can be red and green all over simultaneously, are explained by Wittgen- stein as grammatical propositions associated with the con- stituent expressions which are defined by reference to samples. Thus any ordered pair of samples of black and white is also used to give an ostensive definition of the rela- tion ‘darker than’, and the grammatical proposition that black is darker than white is no more than a consequent rule that if A is black and B white, the inference that A is darker than B is licit. Colour exclusion is similarly explained, not as a metaphysical necessity lying in the nature of things, but as a rule that if something is rightly said to be this colour (pointing at a sample of red) all over, then it may not also be said to be that colour (pointing at a green sample), since this defines a different colour from that. p.m.s.h. *ostensive definition; private language argument. G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, An Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, i: Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning (Oxford, 1980), 168–205. Santayana, George (1863–1952). Born in Madrid of Span- ish parents, complicated family circumstances took him to Boston at the age of 9 and an American career, though he always remained a Spanish citizen. In January 1912 he resigned his Harvard professorship and lived subse- quently in Europe, mostly in hotels in Rome. All his many books were written in English, and he himself said that it was as an American philosopher that he must be counted, if he was to be counted at all. Very different from his older colleague William James, he stands with him as a major figure in ‘the golden age of American philosophy’. San- tayana is distinguished not only as a philosopher, but as a poet, novelist, and literary and cultural critic, famous for his characterization of what he called ‘the genteel trad- ition’ in American culture. The Sense of Beauty (1896) argues that *beauty is the pleas- ure of contemplating an object conceived as a quality of the object itself. Santayana did not wish to disparage beauty by thus analysing it. Indeed, he urged that the experience of beauty was the highest value in human life. (In his later treatment of art in Reason in Art the somewhat shifted emphasis was on the undesirability of separating the aesthetic and the practical; in the good life all human activity is both.) It was the high valuation of aesthetic experience combined with a thoroughly naturalistic 832 Salmon, Wesley account of its basis that made an especial impression. It is perhaps (rather unfortunately) this work which has received most attention of all Santayana’s work. Described as a ‘pot-boiler’ by Santayana, it still sounds a theme basic to his thought that the roots of good lie in man’s animal nature but that its value transcends this. The Life of Reason; or, The Phases of Human Progress, in five volumes, (1905–6) sketches the extent to which the main branches of human thought and activity, common- sense concepts, social organization, religious beliefs and institutions, art, and science have served the life of reason. Every impulse of a conscious being carries a sense of the goodness of its object, a goodness which, if that impulse stood alone, would be as absolute a good as there could be. *Reason is simply a higher-order impulse whose good is the harmonization of other more particular ones and the life of reason is an ideal for all those in whom it is strong enough, but since value is relative it is not the only respectable human option. The work was an important influence on the development of American *naturalism, and praised by Dewey. In the next phase of his philosophy Santayana developed a form of *Critical Realism (in fact, somewhat Thomist in character) and as such was still working in a distinctively American debate. Thus he contributed to an American philosophical manifesto called Essays in Critical Realism (1920) (a riposte to The New Realism: Comparative Studies in Philosophy (1912), the manifesto of a very sophis- ticated sort of naïve realism partly inspired by James). Whereas naïve realism holds that a perceived (or perhaps otherwise known) physical object is directly present to our consciousness, and indirect realism that what is directly present is particular sense-impressions from which we infer the existence of physical things, Critical Realism holds that what is directly present is an essence which characterizes the known object. Thus there is noth- ing from whose presented character we infer the existence of an object; rather, we are presented with a character which rightly or wrongly we take to be the character of something upon which we are intent. This intentness upon an object, considered as a purely mental phenom- enon, is simply a kind of primitive preconceptual directed- ness on something beyond one’s own mental state. What settles the object I am intent on is that I am actually physic- ally affected by and physically adapting to it. Thus physical relations pick out the object and the essence intuited characterizes it for me (thus ‘externalism’ about subjects, ‘internalism’ about predicates). If I am perceiving something correctly, then the essence intuited somehow applies to the physical thing on which my behavioural response is directed. If it is ever part of the very essence of the thing, then I know that thing literally (though the essence is still exemplified twice over, once for my mind, once in the object); if, as is more usual, it is simply a suitable symbol of it for human purposes, our knowledge is symbolic. This point of view is developed most fully in Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923) and Realms of Being (1927–40) as part of an element in an elaborate and carefully worked- out ontological system. Many admirers of The Life of Reason were dismayed by these works, misunderstanding them as a retreat from naturalism. Although Scepticism and Animal Faith is primarily a work in epistemology, Santayana was far from thinking epistemology the core of philosophy; he is simply con- cerned to clear away the objections of epistemologists before presenting his ontology. If knowledge is required, in Cartesian fashion, to be inherently certain, then knowledge, as opposed to the mere intuition of presented ‘essences’, is indeed impos- sible. But we should not pretend to a scepticism we cannot really hold, and should admit to a system of beliefs which, its truth once granted, can be seen as inevitable in a con- scious animal. We rightly call this ‘knowledge’ because we believe it true and generated in a manner which is, in fact, reliable. This naturalistic epistemology differs from some later views, which it anticipates, by stressing that most of our knowledge is symbolic rather than literal. It provides us with a sense of how things are, adequate for practical purposes, but not revealing the real essence of the facts it registers. Such knowledge consists of ‘faith mediated by symbols’, the symbols being the essences, sensory and value-laden in ordinary thought, more purely structural in science, which present themselves to human perception and thought as we grapple with the world. The four volumes of Realms of Being deal in turn with the four realms of being or categories of reality which Santayana distinguishes. The character of any part of the physical world at any moment is an essence. The realm of essence also includes all characters which might have been possessed by some part of the physical world, or which might present themselves as possible characters of things to spirit (any mind); it is, in short, the realm of pure possibilities. There is one pecu- liarly basic essence, the essence of pure being. Every other essence is some determinate form of this, standing to it as all more specific colours stand to the essence of pure colour. It is a common something present in each specific essence, from which it can be abstracted and contem- plated apart in one kind of mystical experience. Pure being should be distinguished from existence; it is equally pre- sent in the essence unicorn, and the essence horse, but only the latter occurs existentially. The realm of matter consists of material or physical sub- stance spread out in space and changing from moment to moment according to temporal patterns called the laws of nature. It allows essences to stand in external relations not determined by their own inherent nature as are their inter- nal relations one to another; such standing in external rela- tions distinguishes existence from mere being. Certain processes in matter generate spirit. This is pri- marily the consciousness which some part of the physical world has of its environment, but the spirit or conscious- ness generated within an organism also contains much fantastic imagination, sometimes recognized and rightly enjoyed merely as such, sometimes serving as spirit’s only Santayana, George 833 vaguely true grasp of the world it inhabits. The totality of spirit in the world constitutes the realm of spirit. Santayana subscribes to what he calls materialism: not the doctrine that all reality is physical, but that only the physical has causal power. For spirit is simply an eman- ation from certain processes in the physical world, in par- ticular the ‘psyches’ of animals, from which it should be sharply distinguished. Psyches consist in the genetically determined patterns of life-sustaining behaviour of organ- isms, adapted to changing circumstances in higher ani- mals by physical representations of the environment in their brains, representations which should be distin- guished from the non-efficacious thinking pertaining to the realm of spirit which they sustain, whose pragmatic truth therefore strictly consists not in its own usefulness but in that of the physical processes which give rise to it. But though spirit is non-efficacious, it alone brings value into the world. The tension between Santayana’s *epi- phenomenalism and the pragmatic element in his account of knowledge stops short of inconsistency and is import- ant for his value theory. There remains the realm of truth. This ‘is the total history and destiny of matter and spirit, or the enormously com- plex essence which they exemplify by existing’. *Truth, for Santayana, is supertemporal; it is the unwritten record of all events through all times, and our truths are simply such fragments of this one total truth as we humans hap- pen to grasp, mostly only in symbolic form. (The truth about the future is as determinate as that about the past, not because of determinism, but because the distinction between past and future has no standing for absolute truth.) His stress on the reality of such an absolutely objec- tive truth about the world, which far surpasses any pos- sible knowledge, represents his strongest divergence from the idealists and pragmatists who dominated philosophy in his earlier student and professorial days (and whose cen- tral claims are still very much with us in various transform- ations). There is, however, a strong pragmatist element in his treatment of the symbolic truth through which we deal effectively with our environment (or at least which expresses our dealing with it), which constitutes most human knowledge. This partly justifies the tendency to classify him as a pragmatist. In The Realm of Spirit (1940) and other such later works as The Idea of Christ in the Gospels (1946) Santayana develops a somewhat Platonic account of ‘the spiritual life’; one dedicated to a kind of mystical intuition of essences for their own sake, rather than as a guide to practical action; in particular those essences which can be contemplated under the form of the good. This, however, represents just one possible human option, and Santayana still declares his preference for the life of reason, in which spirituality is just one ingredient in a wider human harmony. More- over, because Plato makes his forms efficacious agencies in the natural world, operating on it from another realm, he regards himself as finally closer to Aristotle and Spin- oza. What particularly evoked Santayana’s hostility was any idea that the world, and the truth about it, are some- how a human construction. He deplored such human egotism, which he saw as the besetting sin of modern idea- lism and pragmatism, as expressing a dangerous resent- ment of our dependence on a greater non-human cosmos and unrealistic glorification of human power. In oppos- ition to all such ‘cosmic impiety’ Santayana called himself a naturalist, regarding Spinoza as one of the chief teachers of this viewpoint. t.l.s.s. Noel O’Sullivan, Santayana (St Albans, 1993). John Lachs, George Santayana (Boston, 1988). H. S. Levinson, Santayana, Pragmatism and the Spiritual Life (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992). T. L. S. Sprigge, Santayana: An Examination of his Philosophy (London, 1974). Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. A relativistic doctrine. Accord- ing to Sapir, ‘We see and hear . . . very largely as we do because the *language habits of our community pre- dispose certain choices of interpretation’ (‘The Status of Linguistics as a Science’ (1929)). Whorf developed the idea, attempting to illustrate it from American Indian lan- guages. The doctrine risks collapse into the truism that some things can be said more easily in some languages than in others. r.k. B. L. Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. J. B. Carroll (Cambridge, Mass., 1956). Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80). Sartre’s œuvre is a unique phenomenon. No other major philosopher has also been a major playright, novelist, political theorist, and literary critic. It is still too early to judge which facet of Sartre’s extraordinary genius posterity will regard as the most important, but since his philosophy permeates his other works, its enduring interest is assured. After a provincial childhood spent, if we can trust Sartre’s captivating autobiographical essay Words, in his grandfather’s library, Sartre studied philosophy at the École Normale in Paris. In 1931 he became a teacher of philosophy in Le Havre, which he hated (Le Havre is ‘Bou- ville’ in Nausea). In 1937 he moved to Paris, and the next year his brilliant philosophical novel Nausea was pub- lished. Many of the themes of this book recur in his first major philosophical book L’Imaginaire (1940) (whose botched English translation bears the title The Psychology of Imagination). But then the war intervened: Sartre was mobilized in 1939, and served as a meteorologist in the French Army. He later described the war as the turning- point in his life, one which changed him from an academic philosopher and avant-garde writer into an intellectual deeply committed to the fate of the ‘Wretched of the Earth’ (the title of the famous work by Fanon for which Sartre wrote an eloquent preface). Military service did not, however, stem the flow of words: he wrote volumin- ous diaries (excellently translated as his War Diaries), which contain early drafts of his philosophical work, mixed in with marvellous descriptions of his experiences and colleagues. In 1940 Sartre was captured and imprisoned: in prison he continued his study of Heidegger’s 834 Santayana, George philosophy and wrote his first play. Released a year later, he returned to occupied Paris and to his post as a teacher of philosophy. His desire to work with the Resistance was complicated by his unwillingness to commit himself to either the Communists or the Gaullists, and in the end he devoted most of this time to writing his most important philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (1943). With the liberation came instant fame, as dramatist (thanks to Flies andNo Exit) and philosopher: his optimistic 1945 lecture Existentialism and Humanism seized the imagin- ation of a generation. Sartre could have continued his academic career, but he chose to refuse all academic pos- itions and to make his living as a writer, an occupation which he combined with an active concern for the politi- cal and social affairs of the day. The nature of Sartre’s engagements was at first largely shaped by his complex relationships with the Communist Party, which he joined at the time of the Korean War and then left, never to return, after the Russian suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Not surprisingly, his reflections on *Marxism date from this period, and over the next decade he developed the ‘existentialist Marxism’ first expounded in his 1957 essay Search for a Method, and then further developed in his second large-scale philosophical treatise, Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). Towards the end of this period he committed himself whole-heartedly to the struggle for liberation in Algeria (a cause which nearly cost him his life in 1961). A few years later the same passions stirred him to lead the French opposition to the American involvement in Vietnam, and these commitments are reflected in several long essays on behalf of the Third World. In 1964 he was offered the Nobel Prize for Litera- ture, but chose to decline the offer. The student uprising of May 1968 seemed to show that Sartre’s writings were still as influential as ever, as he addressed thousands in the Sorbonne; but in truth, his intellectual reputation was now eclipsed by structuralists (such as Lévi-Strauss and Althusser), and post-structuralists (such as Derrida and Deleuze). Sensing this loss of intellectual sympathy, and combating increasing blindness and other illnesses, Sartre largely withdrew from public affairs and turned his attention to the completion of his final magnum opus, his vast study of Flaubert, L’Idiot de la famille; sadly, his eye- sight gave out in 1973, when only three out of five projected volumes had been completed. Yet his funeral showed that he retained an extraordinary hold on the public imagination: over 50,000 people turned up in a spontaneous demonstration of respect. In his early philosophical writings from the 1930s Sartre was primarily concerned to develop Husserl’s phenome- nological methods and apply them to the study of the *imagination. He argues that the traditional conception of mental imagery derived from the theory of *ideas is inco- herent, and needs to be replaced by a recognition that imagination, like perception, is a distinctive mode of intentional consciousness whose contents should not be treated as if they were inner objects. Sartre’s special inter- est in the imagination derives partly from its connections with aesthetics and the use of the imagination in creating ideal worlds which contrast with the perceived actual world (this is a prominent theme of Nausea); but also from the fact that he regards the exercise of the imagination as the paradigmatic exercise of freedom. He argues that, because the content of the imagination, ‘the imaginary’, characteristically goes beyond the actual world, there sim- ply cannot be an adequate causal theory of the imagin- ation, since the effects of actual causes cannot be anything but actual. This argument is unsatisfactory, for Sartre con- fuses the fact that what is imagined is characteristically not actual with the claim that the act of imagination itself is not actual; but we can agree with him that the imagination is a primary manifestation of human freedom without accepting his argument. *Freedom is not just a phenomenon of the imagination, however: according to Sartre, all consciousness is in some way free (so that the imagination is a privileged manifest- ation of consciousness in general). In order to understand Sartre’s conception of the essential freedom of conscious- ness we need now to turn to Being and Nothingness. Sartre begins this work by arguing that consciousness belongs to a different ontological category from that of the physical world. The key premiss for this ontological distinction is an obscure thesis that consciousness is always constituted by a tacit *self-consciousness. Sartre argues that the con- ception of a conscious mental state which does not include this self-conscious dimension is incoherent, since it would be an unconscious conscious state; but this argument is plainly fallacious, although there may be other reasons for thinking that consciousness implies the possibility of self- consciousness. What is distinctive about the Sartrean con- ception, however, is not just the association between consciousness and self-consciousness, but the claim that the self-conscious dimension is constitutive. It is not easy to see why Sartre holds this, but it seems to rest on a pre- sumption, similar to that employed in his discussion of the imagination, that the *intentional content of conscious- ness is in principle inexplicable in causal terms. If that pre- sumption is granted, then it follows that consciousness cannot get its essential intentional content from the phys- ical world; in which case, if there is to be an explanation of any kind for it, it is tempting to have recourse to a consti- tutive self-consciousness, though this requires the dubi- ous assumption that the content of this self-consciousness is itself unproblematic. This constitutive role for self-consciousness, however exactly it is understood, explains why Sartre now proceeds to call those aspects of human life which involve con- sciousness the ‘for-itself’ (pour-soi). This contrasts with all physical facts, which are independent of consciousness and comprise the ‘in itself’ (en-soi). This distinction is not, however, one between substances of two different kinds; for Sartre denies that consciousness is a substance at all. Instead, the distinction is one between types of fact. Phys- ical facts satisfy ordinary classical logic: ‘they are what they are’. But, according to Sartre, the same logic does not hold of consciousness: here things ‘are what they are not and Sartre, Jean-Paul 835 are not what they are’. This thesis connects with the fea- ture of Sartre’s philosophy which is most difficult to come to terms with—his treatment of negation. Like other opponents of negative facts, Sartre argues that negation does not reside ‘in things themselves’; instead, he holds, it is introduced into our conception of the world as a quasi- Kantian category whose transcendental justification lies in the fact that the self-conscious structure of consciousness involves negation—‘the being by which Nothingness comes to the world must be its own Nothingness’ (Being and Nothingness, 23). This baffling doctrine implies that the constitutive role of self-consciousness is at the same time self-nihilating. One would like to set this doctrine aside as a rhetorical extravagance; but this is impossible, since, according to Sartre, this capacity for reflexive self-negation is the core of human freedom and, indeed, human life. The best one can do to grasp Sartre’s intention is to point to the phenomena he uses to illustrate our self-directed ‘nothing- ness’—such facts as that we can always detach ourselves from the roles we find ourselves occupying (as in Sartre’s famous example of the waiter in a café), and that in cases of self-deception we convince ourselves of something pre- cisely because we already believe the opposite. This theory of consciousness so far lacks any reference to the *self, or subject of consciousness. This omission is deliberate, for in one of his first essays (The Transcendence of the Ego) Sartre took issue with Husserl’s doctrine of the transcendental subject and argued that consciousness is fundamentally impersonal. In Being and Nothingness this thesis is significantly modified in the light of that of the con- stitutive role of self-consciousness: Sartre argues here that this self-consciousness characteristically includes a set of commitments and aspirations that gives a projective unity to the acts of consciousness that they inform, and, in doing so, strings them together as the acts of a single person— ‘consciousness by the pure nihilating movement of reflec- tion makes itself personal’ (Being and Nothingness, 103). In the last part of the book Sartre develops this theme in a rich and detailed elucidation of the purposive structures of psy- chological explanations. Two aspects of this account are specially worthy of notice. The first concerns Sartre’s atti- tude to Freud. In an early section of the book Sartre launches a well-known critique of Freud’s theory of the unconscious which is motivated by Sartre’s claim that con- sciousness is essentially self-conscious. Sartre also argues here that Freud’s theory of repression is internally flawed, but this argument is based on a misunderstanding of Freud. What is of more interest, however, is Sartre’s attempt, towards the end of the book, to adapt some of Freud’s ideas to his own account of human life, and thereby to develop an ‘existential psychoanalysis’ in which Freud’s causal categories are replaced by Sartre’s own teleo- logical ones. The theme of consciousness is not so domin- ant here, and the method of psychological inquiry Sartre began here is one that he was to employ fruitfully in several biographical works (including Baudelaire (1946), Saint Genet—Actor and Martyr (1952), and The Idiot of the Family (1971–2)). One feature of these studies is the emphasis Sartre comes to place upon the formation during childhood of a ‘fundamental project’ which gives unity to the person’s subsequent life, and this brings me to the second notable aspect of Sartre’s psychological theory. In Being and Noth- ingness Sartre writes of the formation of this fundamental project as a ‘choice’, and it is easy to see why he says this in the light of his emphasis on freedom—he calls this choice ‘the fundamental act of freedom’ (Being and Nothingness, 461). Sartre is here reviving a doctrine central to Kant’s conception of freedom, but, like Kant, Sartre faces insol- uble problems in explaining how such an act can be a choice at all, since all the subject’s reasons for choice are referred back to their fundamental project. Hence it is not surprising that when Sartre attempted to apply this con- ception in his biographical studies, a causal mode of expla- nation concerning the formation in childhood of one’s fundamental project appears to replace the abstract schemata of Being and Nothingness. We have seen how subjectivity is achieved through the reference of acts of consciousness, through their tacit self- conscious structure, to a single project. Sartre makes it clear in Nausea that Roquentin’s abandonment of his pro- ject brings with it the end of his subjectivity—‘suddenly the I pales, pales and goes out’ (Nausea, 241). One can ask whether subjectivity does not also involve reference to other persons, perhaps, as Hegel supposed, to their recog- nition of one’s status as a subject. In Being and Nothingness, however, Sartre argues that although, for each of us, there is an aspect of ourselves that is dependent on recognition by others (our ‘being-for-others’), this is an alienated con- ception of ourselves that we cannot integrate into our own self-consciousness; in relation to ourselves as we are for ourselves we are not dependent upon others. Sartre’s discussion of this thesis includes a sustained analysis of a variety of situations in which we become aware of each other (most famously, that of the peeping Tom who hears someone behind him), and in my judgement these analy- ses provide the finest example of the application of phe- nomenological methods of analysis, not only by Sartre, but by any philosopher. Yet their conclusion is paradox- ical—that we are always ‘de trop in relation to others’ (Being and Nothingness, 410). The ethical implication of this is that ‘respect for the Other’s freedom is an empty word’ (Being and Nothingness, 409). Yet how can this be combined with the thesis which he proclaims in his 1945 lecture Existentialism and Human- ism, that ‘I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as mine’ (p. 52)? One part of the explanation is that Being and Nothingness is incomplete, and was always intended primarily as an exploration of human life as guided by illusions such as a belief in determinism and in the independent reality of ethical values. It was supposed to be balanced by a further book in which a life freed from these illusions was explored. This book was never com- pleted, though Existentialism and Humanism and Sartre’s 1947 notebooks Cahiers pour une morale (now published) reveal his broad intentions. The crucial point that emerges 836 Sartre, Jean-Paul from them is that Sartre maintains that although our meta- physical freedom does not depend upon others, there is another kind of freedom, moral freedom, which does depend upon others; as he puts it in the 1947 notebooks, ‘morality is only possible if everyone is moral’. Sartre’s acceptance of this thesis coincides with his growing awareness of the need to fill out the rather abstract account of consciousness he had offered with an account of the relationships between an individual and their society. His approach to these relationships is, of course, deeply influenced by his study of Marx, and he likes to portray himself as a historical materialist (‘I have said—and I repeat—that the only valid interpretation of human History is historical materialism’ (Critique of Dialect- ical Reason, 39–40)). But in Search for a Method he is a bril- liant critic of the reductive historical materialism familiar from orthodox Marxist theory; he offers instead a version which incorporates parts of the account of human life pre- sented in Being and Nothingness. But the theme of human freedom is now given little direct emphasis: in a striking passage in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (pp. 233–4) he describes how workers who have some monotonous task are prone to engage in sexual fantasies—thereby contra- dicting his youthful insistence that the imagination is a citadel of absolute freedom. Indeed in a 1972 essay (‘The Itinerary of a Thought’) Sartre describes his earlier views about freedom as ‘scandalous’ and ‘incredible’. Yet he remains as strongly committed as ever to the distinctive- ness of human affairs: ‘dialectical reason’ is the mode of rationality characteristic of social and psychological explan- ations, and contrasts with ‘analytical reason’, which is the rationality appropriate to the physical sciences. A central mark of ‘dialectical reason’ is the involvement of holistic explanations. This was already a feature of the account of psychological explanation given in Being and Nothingness, and to some extent the account of social explanation in Sartre’s later works is an extrapolation into a broader historical and interpersonal field of the earlier account. In this case, however, the holistic theme is under- pinned by an assumption basic to all Sartre’s later work, that all human affairs are conducted under conditions of relative scarcity. For this implies that humans always con- front each other as potential competitors, and, according to Sartre, it is this threat which both motivates all social and economic structures, and, in the end, unifies human history. This assumption of scarcity also provides one basis for the *alienation which Sartre, like Marx, regards as an endemic feature of human history up to the present. But Sartre differs significantly from Marx in holding that alien- ation also arises from the fact that the realization of human purposes creates material structures (houses, machines, etc.—the ‘practico-inert’) that are inherently liable them- selves to place further demands on people and, in some cases, to subvert the very purposes they were intended to promote. A central theme of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason is, indeed, one of the attempt to overcome the con- straints of the practico-inert through social institutions, and then of the failure of this attempt as social institutions themselves ossify and join the practicoinert. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason as published, this theme is developed with particular reference to the French Revolution; in the projected second volume of the Critique (which was pub- lished posthumously) the same theme is discussed with reference to the Russian Revolution. The Critique bears witness to Sartre’s disillusionment with the fate of communist states (though not with Marx- ism), and in it he returns to the pessimism of Being and Nothingness. The kind of moral freedom that he had envis- aged in Existentialism and Humanism is now presented as entirely utopian. Yet it was the themes of that lecture which once captivated the post-war generation, and, I sus- pect, it will be as protagonist of the value of existential freedom that he will be remembered. t.r.b. *existentialism; continental philosophy. P. Caws, Sartre (London, 1979). P. Chiodi, Sartre and Marxism (New York, 1976). A. Cohen-Solal, Sartre (London, 1987). C. Howells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Sartre (Cambridge, 1992). F. Jeanson, Sartre and the Problem of Morality (Indiana, 1980). G. McCulloch, Using Sartre (London, 1994). J P. Sartre, La Nausée (Paris, 1938); tr. Robert Baldick as Nausea (Harmondsworth, 1965). —— L’Être et le néant (Paris, 1943); tr. Hazel Barnes as Being and Nothingness (London, 1969). —— L’Existentialisme et un humanisme (Paris, 1946); tr. Philip Mairet as Existentialism and Humanism (London, 1948). —— Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris, 1960); tr. Alan Sheridan- Smith as Critique of Dialectical Reason (London, 1976). satisfaction. The relation of satisfaction was introduced into logical investigations by Alfred Tarski. A *formula like ‘x < 7’, for example, is satisfied by some values (in this case, those less than 7) of its ‘free’ number-variable x, and not by others. Tarski extended such an account to formu- lae of any degree of logical complexity, as a preliminary to defining truth for those formulae whose variables, if any, are bound by a *quantifier. c.h. E. Mendelson, Introduction to Mathematical Logic, 3rd edn. (Monterey, Calif., 1987). satisficing. ‘Satisficing’ means ‘seeking or achieving a sat- isfactory, but less than a maximum or optimum, result for the agent or for some group’. The term was originally introduced by economists, and satisficing models in *eco- nomics, biology, and other sciences explain phenomena without assuming that nature or people are maximally efficient or rational. In ethics and rational-choice theory, the term refers to choices and actions that seek or achieve enough, but not maximal or optimal, well-being or desire-satisfaction, given other situational possibilities. Satisficing choice is sometimes rationally or morally recommended for cases where the calculations necessary to maximizing purposes are too difficult or costly to per- form. But although such justifications are clearly instru- mental, some ethicists hold that satisficing choices or actions can also be inherently admirable or rational as an satisficing 837 expression of moderation in one’s desires and thus of admirable self-sufficiency. m.s. *utilitarianism. M. Slote, Beyond Optimizing (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). saturated expression: see unsaturated expression. saying and showing. For the early Wittgenstein, the log- ical form of a proposition, and of the reality mirrored by it, ‘showed itself’ in that proposition; it was not something that could be stated. At paragraph 4.1212 of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein wrote: ‘What can be shown, cannot be said’. It is from this thought that the ‘mystical’ strain in the Trac- tatus really springs; Wittgenstein’s remarks towards the book’s end, on ethics, death, and the ‘sense of the world’, are all to the effect that what is at issue is something which cannot be put into words, but which makes itself manifest. That the idea expressed at 4.1212 should there relate to the logical properties of propositions thus indicates how far the author thought that the whole of philosophy (ethics etc.) could be dealt with—and to a large extent dis- missed—by consideration of the nature of logic. r.p.l.t. L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, tr. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London, 1961). Scanlon, T. M. (1940– ). Moral and political philosopher best known for his work on contractualist moral theory. Scanlon published influential papers in the 1970s (e.g. ‘Pref- erence and Urgency’, Journal of Philosophy, 1975, and ‘Rights, Goals, and Fairness’, in S. Hampshire (ed.), Public and Private Morality, 1978), but what established him as a leading moral philosopher was his ‘Contractualism and Utilitarianism’, published in A. Sen and B. Williams (eds.), Utilitarianism and Beyond (1982). Scanlon’s contractualism held that an act is wrong if it is forbidden by any system of rules that no one could reasonably reject as the basis for informed, unforced general agreement. Books by Thomas Nagel (1991), Peter Carruthers (1992), Richard Miller (1992), and Brian Barry (1995) and a wide array of journal articles drew on Scanlon’s theory. Scanlon’s book What We Owe to Each Other (1998) not only develops his contractual- ism but also advances important arguments concerning normative reasons, well-being, moral motivation, respon- sibility, honesty, and relativism. b.h. Social Theory and Practice, special issue on Scanlon’s book, April 2002. Ratio, special issue on Scanlon’s book, December 2003. scepticism. Philosophical scepticism questions our cogni- tive achievements, challenging our ability to obtain reli- able knowledge. Global scepticism casts *doubt upon all our attempts to seek the truth; more restricted forms of scepticism may question our knowledge of ethical mat- ters, of the past, of other minds, of the underlying struc- ture of matter, and so on. Since Descartes, the defence of our knowledge against scepticism has seemed to be the first task of epistemology. (*Scepticism, history of.) To say that sceptics deny the possibility of knowledge may distort the discussion: we might not feel threatened if we were capable of justified belief but not of knowledge (properly so called). Some recent writers pose the issues in terms of claims: when I put something forward as true, I present myself as making a legitimate claim and as able to resist intelligible challenges that may be made to it. If scep- tical writings present ways of offering intelligible chal- lenges to our claims which we cannot deal with, it seems that we cannot take responsibility for the legitimacy of any of our claims. We cannot carry out our inquiries in a responsible, self-controlled manner. It is only through tunnel vision or self-deception, closing our eyes to chal- lenges we ought to take account of, that we are able to hold on to our opinions about the world. The most discussed challenge in recent writing is a vari- ant on Descartes’s evil demon (*malin génie). Our ordinary practice of defending opinions requires us to reject explan- ations of our beliefs which are compatible with their fal- sity: if I cannot discriminate house sparrows from tree sparrows, my claim to have seen a tree sparrow should be withdrawn unless I can explain why no confusion was pos- sible on this occasion. It is alleged that my experience may have been just as it is now had my brain been removed from my body, placed in a vat of nutrients, and wired up to a computer which was providing me with a coherent sequence of (misleading) experiences. This presents me with an analogous challenge which cannot be defeated: anything I might appeal to in order to show that I am not a *brain in a vat could have been planted in my mind by the computer. It seems that my everyday claims are legitimate only if I can answer this sceptical challenge; and there seems no possibility of my doing this. An alternative struc- ture of sceptical argument points out that, whenever I make a claim, I can be asked for its ground or justification. When I offer a ground, this involves making yet another claim, which can in turn be questioned. Since it is question- begging to use a circular argument to justify a claim to knowledge, my first claim is only legitimately made if I am prepared to enter an infinite regress of justifications. Of course, such challenges have no role in our ordinary practice of making and defending views: if we were to invoke them, we would appear silly or mad. But the sig- nificance of this is unclear: it might be a sign that these sceptical doubts are unnatural or improper that the legit- imacy of our beliefs is not affected by our ignoring them. If that is correct, then we could safely avoid any engagement with arguments in the sceptical canon. If, on the other hand, it simply reflects the ways in which we cope prac- tically with the fact that scepticism is unanswerable (by ignoring it), then it would be evasion of responsibility to ignore sceptical arguments when, as philosophers, we seek an overall assessment of our cognitive position. Sev- eral contemporary philosophers, notably Barry Stroud, suspect that scepticism may be unavoidable. In the background of much recent discussion is G. E. Moore’s ‘proof of the *external world’: holding his hand before him, he affirmed his knowledge that he had two 838 satisficing hands, and, since hands were objects in the external world, he concluded that there was an external world. Many philosophers are attracted by the robust insistence that these beliefs need no defence, but also have a strong sense that Moore missed an important point. One reaction, associated with Stroud, is that although my certainty that I have two hands needs no defence in our everyday prac- tices, the same is not the case when we attempt a distinc- tively philosophical assessment of our position. The sense that Moore’s argument settles nothing gains support from Wittgenstein’s suggestion, in On Certainty, that talk of ‘knowledge’ is appropriate only when doubt is intelligible and grounds are available: if Moore claims ‘knowledge’, challenge and criticism is appropriate. If we are to resist the suggestion that sceptical challenges are relevant to the evaluation of our beliefs, the attractive element of the view needs a more sophisticated formulation than it received from Moore. An influential argument that standard sceptical possi- bilities are irrelevant to our practice of epistemic evalu- ation was contained in Robert Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations. He proposed an analysis of knowledge as belief that ‘tracked the truth’: simplifying slightly, my belief that Wittgenstein was Austrian counts as know- ledge if it is true and if, had Wittgenstein not been Austrian, I would not have believed he was. Since, if I had been a brain in a vat, I would still have believed that I was not one, I do not know that I am not a brain in a vat. But this is irrelevant to the evaluation of more commonplace beliefs: it remains true that if my computer was not switched on, I would not believe that it was; so I do know that it is switched on. Sceptical challenges are thus of no epistemological importance. Some are unhappy about the ‘externalist’ character of Nozick’s approach: whether my beliefs count as know- ledge may not be something I am well placed to judge. Reflection on my ways of monitoring my beliefs suggests that I cannot do this responsibly unless I can be confident of which of my beliefs are justified; or I must be able to identify which of my opinions are knowledge. Even if one of my beliefs tracks the truth, I may be in no position to tell whether it is. Nozick’s claims about ‘knows’ need supple- menting by an account of how such confidence is possible; and it is not yet obvious that sceptical challenges cannot threaten this sort of confidence in our ability to monitor our cognitive achievements. Since Logical Positivists attempted to deny the mean- ingfulness of dream or demon possibilities on the grounds that we do not know what experience would be relevant to assessing their truth-value, philosophers have appealed to the theory of meaning. It is part of Donald Davidson’s the- ory of interpretation that, when we assign meanings to someone’s utterances or contents to their beliefs, we are guided by a demand that we make their beliefs largely truthful and their inferences largely sound. If that is cor- rect, then it is impossible that someone’s beliefs should be overwhelmingly false or unwarranted: that they seemed to be so would show simply that we had misinterpreted them. If we encountered a brain in a vat, then, if we ascribed beliefs to it at all, they would be predominantly true beliefs about the ‘world’ created by the computer rather than predominantly false beliefs about our familiar external world. Whether or not we can conceive of the possibility that we are the victims of demons or wicked sci- entists, we can make no sense of our claims being both meaningful and substantially false. In that case, we can be confident of our ability to acquire information about the world, and revise our opinions in rational and defensible ways. But again, this does not satisfy those who are uneasy about the details of Davidson’s account of *interpretation: extrapolating from the ways we interpret our fellows to our ways of interpreting the poor brain is not easy to do; and since the ‘experiences’ undergone by the brain in a vat are supposedly indistinguishable from ours, we find it hard to escape the conclusion that it is indeed grossly deceived. In an influential and controversial discussion, Hilary Putnam has argued that sceptical possibilities are self- refuting: a brain in a vat could not formulate the thought that it is one (Reason, Truth and History, ch. 1). Even if the brain in a vat could utter the words ‘I might be a brain in a vat’, they could not have the meaning they have in our speech. The argument depends (like Davidson’s) on views about how words acquire reference: roughly, the sceptical use of these possibilities requires the agent to use a word ‘vat’ which ‘refers’ to a kind of thing (a real vat in the exter- nal world) which has no role in the brain’s experience. Put- nam rejects the claim that this rests upon a kind of ‘intrinsic’ or magical connection: we can make no sense of our referring to objects which have no role in the caus- ation of our beliefs and concepts. If we understand the ref- erence of our words and concepts in terms of their role in making sense of experience and classifying things in ways which answer to our needs, then we find that the brain in a vat uses ‘vat’ to refer to the ‘vats’ in the world of its experience rather than to these objects which are wholly independent of it. He is an internal realist rather than a metaphysical realist. In our ordinary practice, we make ‘local’ challenges to particular beliefs and particular methods of inquiry against a background view of the world that stands firm and can be relied upon in meeting the challenge. Global challenges, like the ‘brain in a vat’ possibility, threaten this background view of the world along with more controversial claims. If Davidson’s argument works, then we can legitimately refuse to take global challenges seriously: we can always trust our background view of the world in meeting any challenges that arise; and global challenges are importantly different from local ones: they are unnatural and we do not act irresponsibly in ignoring them. Many would agree that our best hope for avoiding scepticism rests on finding a way to treat global challenges as not analogous to local ones: we cannot be forced to take them into account by thinking through the consequences of our ordinary prac- tice of challenging and defending claims and beliefs. A major influence upon this line of thought has been Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. Having criticized Moore’s scepticism 839 . in earlier years the chief instigator of the reanimation, particularly in Oxford, of the philosophical scene. His first efforts, in the 1920s, to ‘break the mould’ led him into the study of continental. filosofii (Questions of Philosophy) , founded in the 1940s, remains the leading philosophy publication in Russia. Under the editorship of V. A. Lektorsky (b. 1930), the journal negoti- ated the collapse of the old. introduced thus. The sample is not the property pointed at, but the object (the patch on the colour chart, or the metal rod) that fulfils the canonical role in the practice of using the word. Whether something