claims to ‘knowledge’, he continued: ‘I should like to say that Moore does not know what he says he knows, but it stands fast for him, as also for me; regarding it as absolutely solid is part of our method of inquiry’ (para.151). My certainty that I have a hand is proof against sceptical arguments; and it is one of a heterogeneous group of cer- tainties that form the background to all my ways of form- ing hypotheses, challenging claims, and conducting inquiries. Describing them as ‘known’ blinds us to the dis- tinctive role occupied by these certainties which provide the ‘scaffolding’ for our inquiries. When the giving of grounds comes to an end, he urges, it is not in ‘a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language game’ (para. 204). These certainties are man- ifested in the ways in which we react to evidence and to hypotheses, in our activities and our instinctive responses to the world. They are not expressed in conscious assent to propositions or in the search for evidence to support them. Local challenges are met by relying upon this scaf- folding to guide our responses; since the scaffolding is not presented as ‘knowledge’, challenges to it cannot be posed or understood. Whether this provides a perspective from which we can resist the traditional philosophical obsession with scepti- cism may still be an open question. Our best hope for doing so may well be to argue, with Wittgenstein, that the ‘scaffolding’ which guides us in forming and questioning beliefs cannot itself be questioned. But whether this sug- gestion will carry conviction for those who feel vividly the force of traditional sceptical arguments must remain uncertain. c.j.h. *knowledge, limits of; fallibilism; Pyrrhonism; founda- tionalism. D. Davidson, ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, in E. Lepore (ed.), Truth and Interpretation (Oxford, 1986). K. DeRose and T. Warfield (eds.), Skepticism: A Contemporary Reader (New York, 1999). C. J. Hookway, Scepticism (London, 1990). M. McGinn, Sense and Certainty (Oxford, 1989). R. Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass., 1981). H. Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge, 1981). B. Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism (Oxford, 1985). L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford, 1977). scepticism, history of. The sceptical tradition questions our ability to obtain knowledge: if we are to seek the truth in a responsible manner, we need to meet challenges and difficulties to which no defensible answer is available. When we examine the history of this tradition, we study both the developments in the kinds of challenges used to unsettle our confidence, and changing views of the philo- sophical importance that these challenges have. The history falls into two main periods. During the Hel- lenistic age, sceptical schools emerged in Greek philosophy, challenging the claims of scientists and philosophers to plumb the nature of reality. And, in the fifteenth and six- teenth centuries, new vigour was given to the question of philosophical *scepticism by the intellectual ferment result- ing from battles between different theological positions and from the challenge posed by the new sciences to our every- day view of the world. Many date the birth of ‘modern phil- osophy’ from the time when Descartes identified the defeat of scepticism as the first task of philosophy. Plato’s philosophy bequeathed an ambiguous legacy. Socrates appeared to possess the ability to question and undermine any dogmatic assertion that was put to him, insisting that wisdom consisted in awareness of the extent of one’s own ignorance. But having emphasized the importance of knowledge that was properly grounded or tethered, he explained how such knowledge was possible, suggesting that it was necessary for the exercise of virtue. During the centuries following Plato’s death, his *Acad- emy became associated with a subtle form of scepticism, which focused more on the first part of this legacy than the second. And a breakaway sect took the name of *‘Pyrrhonism’, after Pyrrho of Elis, a post-Socratic philosopher whose life exhibited extreme scepticism. Our best source of Pyrrhonist thought is the writings of Sextus Empiricus, a late member of the school, whose Outlines of Pyrrhonism is a handbook of the position. The Pyrrhonist ‘modes’ were used to challenge the beliefs of ‘dogmatists’: their use could supposedly force anyone to suspend judgement on any matter. Exposure to such techniques could produce a ‘life without belief’: a general suspension of judgement. A common objection was that without belief one cannot act, supported by the story that Pyrrho required constant support from friends to save him from natural dangers which he did not believe in. But, according to Sextus, Pyrrhonists could expect a quiet, conservative life: they passively acquiesced in ‘appearances’, going by perceptual information and by what appeared right and wrong; they conformed to local religious and ethical customs; and they acquired a trade. What they lacked was information about non-evident properties of things; and they accepted appearances pas- sively, avoiding active endorsement of positions and tak- ing no responsibility for their truth. This ‘life without belief’ turned out to yield the tranquillity and fulfilment (ataraxia) that others had sought through actively seeking knowledge. Pyrrhonists challenged ‘beliefs’ by proposing contrast- ing ‘appearances’: when you assert that the tower is round, I point out that it does not appear round from a dis- tance. To sustain your belief, you must propose a criterion that shows why it is correct. Since these criteria, in turn, can be challenged, your attempt to defend your view can only lead to a regress of criteria or go round in a circle, unless you stubbornly insist upon a criterion that you can- not support. If this picture of the structure of challenging beliefs is correct, it seems that you will not be able to avoid admitting that the matter is not settled. During the sixteenth century, the writings of Sextus Empiricus and other Sceptics become more widely known, and questions about the criterion of religious truth and issues about the foundations of the new science 840 scepticism became pressing. Montaigne, in Apology for Raimond Sebond, made sceptical arguments available in the vernacu- lar, and encouraged a more general scepticism concerning whether any system of ideas could resist doubt. An early user of sceptical themes was Erasmus, who defended the Catholic Church against Reformation ideas: he used sceptical arguments to attack Luther’s doctrines and pro- posed (like Sextus) that we should passively conform to existing practices since no defensible criterion of truth was available which could be trusted when we try to criticize them. But at a time of intellectual and religious ferment, Pyrrhonist prescriptions about how to live yielded con- flicting recommendations; and many, like Luther, insisted that conformity to prevailing customs is too tepid a style of religious observance to meet the demands of Christian- ity. It is no accident that epistemological scepticism came increasingly to be associated with the religious variety. And, of course, once the force of sceptical arguments is acknowledged, they cannot easily be prevented from spreading doubt to all areas of life, including the new sciences. Descartes set out to provide secure foundations for sci- ence, metaphysics, and religion by defeating scepticism. This required him to formulate and overcome the strongest possible sceptical arguments. Rather than appealing to particular challenges, particular contrasting appearances, to question each opinion he considered, he needed systematic doubts which put all our beliefs into question. The possibility that I might be dreaming chal- lenged all perceptual beliefs; and the possibility that I was wholly under the influence of an evil demon (*malin génie) threatened logical and metaphysical principles as well. Unless Descartes could legitimately appeal to a criterion enabling him to reject those possibilities, none of our knowledge would be secure. In his Meditations (1641), he attempted to provide such a criterion. Since few of his con- temporaries considered his attempt successful, he bequeathed to later philosophers only a more powerful battery of sceptical challenges and a greater awareness of the importance and difficulty of defeating them. His ‘refu- tation’ of scepticism left it in better shape than before, encouraging a sense of the power of scepticism which cul- minated in Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697–1702). Descartes transformed thought about scepticism in another way, by introducing the idea that our knowledge of the contents of our own minds is more certain than our knowledge of things outside the mind. The problem of the external world, of showing how our subjective data pro- vide us with reason for believing that there are external things, has seemed for many modern philosophers to be the fundamental issue of scepticism, although it was unknown to ancient Sceptics. This may have distorted our understanding of the force and importance of philosoph- ical scepticism. Sceptical considerations had a role in the development of a new empirical approach to science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many of those involved in the development of the new science, for example Mersenne and Gassendi in France and John Locke and John Wilkins in England, would have agreed that sceptical arguments undermine the pretensions of dogmatic metaphysics and also of any scientific claim to reveal the real underlying essence of matter. Locke claimed that the study of nature yields opinion rather that knowledge, and Gassendi pre- sented a version of the atomic theory which claimed only to accord with the patterns found in appearances. A growing modesty in the claims made for hypotheses followed sceptical awareness of the limitations of the human understanding. This emerges clearly in the work of David Hume. Agreeing with those who reject Descartes’s demand that our methods of inquiry be subjected to trial through scep- ticism in order to achieve certainty, Hume sought to emu- late Newton and study cognition by constructing a scientific account of the mind. But he concluded that our beliefs extend beyond our own impressions and ideas only by exploiting causal inferences which have no legitimate basis. He arrives at the sceptical conclusion that the facul- ties giving rise to our view of the world are wholly unfitted to the task. The despair that this threatens to induce is avoided only because, when we turn aside from philoso- phy and science, we are psychologically incapable of tak- ing their discoveries seriously. We are naturally drawn to philosophical investigations, but we find their results absurd and incredible. But Hume believed that to be ‘convinced of the force of the Pyrrhonian doubt, and of the impossibility that any- thing, but the strong power of the natural instinct, could free us from it’ has a beneficial effect upon us. Inducing a sense of modesty, it discourages us from attaching too much importance to theory; we become aware of our cog- nitive limitations. Although we can benefit from scientific results (while sceptical that they promise the last word about things), we shall not allow them to undermine oth- erwise valuable beliefs and ideas. When philosophy encourages scepticism about the reliability of our know- ledge, it is reasonable to extend that scepticism to philoso- phy: it turns into a useful activity, but not one which can provide dogmatic knowledge. There have always been those who respond to sceptical challenges by impatiently denouncing them as absurd stratagems which no one takes seriously, and which can thus be ignored. From the time of Hume, two rationales have emerged for arguing that this response is legitimate. Since these sceptical doubts seem to be introduced in a nat- ural way, resembling challenges we use all the time, we need to understand why they are different. We must explain how they do not show that our inquiries are gov- erned by cognitive aims which we are incapable of achiev- ing. The need, then, is to show that Pyrrhonist and Cartesian sceptical arguments are ‘unnatural’ or improper. *‘Common-sense’ philosophers, from the sixteenth century on, have insisted that demanding reasons and challenging their adequacy can distort the structure of justification. Thomas Reid is an important figure in a scepticism, history of 841 tradition that also includes twentieth-century thinkers such as G. E. Moore. The belief that there is an external world, for example, is not the sort of thing which is sup- ported by particular arguments or reasons: it has stood the test of time, and ‘everything counts for it, nothing counts against it’. Sceptics force us to treat it as one hypothesis among others, thus needing the kind of defence appropri- ate to controversial hypotheses. But such certainties work differently from ordinary hypotheses. Indeed, anything we might introduce as an argument in their support is less certain than they are themselves: I cannot offer evidence in favour of my belief that Rome exists, because any evi- dence suggesting otherwise would automatically be dis- credited for conflicting with such an obvious truth. Kant, by contrast, argued that sceptics posed the wrong question: we unquestionably do possess knowledge, and the philosophical task is only to explain how this is pos- sible. He concluded that our knowledge concerns the empirical world, whose character is determined by the structuring properties of our minds. Sceptical arguments may challenge our ability to know about the noumenal world, about things as they are in themselves. But since our aim in inquiry is to develop knowledge of a world which is shaped by our cognitive constitution, these argu- ments do not touch the only kind of knowledge which really matters to us. c.j.h. *Sceptics, ancient. J. Annas and J. Barnes (eds.), The Modes of Scepticism: Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations (Cambridge, 1985). M. Burnyeat (ed.), The Skeptical Tradition (Berkeley, Calif., 1983). C. J. Hookway, Scepticism (London, 1990). R. H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism (1960; new edn. New York, 2003). scepticism, moral: see moral scepticism. scepticism about law: see law, scepticism about. scepticism about religion: see religion, scepticism about. Sceptics, ancient. The Greek word skeptikoi refers to those philosophers who refused to take dogmatic pos- itions, but rather claimed to be always engaged in ‘investi- gation’ or ‘consideration’ (skepsis) of questions. Pyrrho of Elis (c.360–c.270 bc) is generally regarded as the founder of this school. Nevertheless, later sceptics and historians of *scepticism have often noted that a disposition to reject various claims to knowledge can be found throughout early Greek philosophy. For example, Xenophanes, Par- menides, and Democritus evince scepticism to a greater or less degree regarding claims to know reality. Thus, a denial of knowledge in one or more areas of investigation does not strictly speaking distinguish the Sceptics. Rather, they are distinguished by their adherence to certain gener- alized arguments against dogmatic claims and by their view of the salutary effects of a sceptical stance. Pyrrho is said to have been a painter by training. He was probably not the author of the technical arguments that later came to characterize the thinking of his disciples. He is reputed to have been a man of remarkable calmness and humility, and it was evidently thought by his admirers that these qualities arose from his refusal to commit himself to dogmatic claims. The basic Sceptical strategy is to argue that the sorts of assertion dogmatists make are supposed to be inferred from elementary data such as sense-perceptions. But, the Sceptics argue, these claims are only warranted if the data entail them. Various arguments—the so-called ‘Sceptical tropes’—can be employed to show that the supposed entailment is illusory. In effect, the only evidence a Sceptic will allow is entailing evidence. On this basis, one is no more justified in accepting the dogmatists’ claims than their opposite. So, the only rational response is to say ‘I no more accept p than its opposite’, whatever claim p might express. What is the supposed result of being thus disposed to the dogmatists’ claims? Tranquillity of mind and an absence of anxious attention to putatively life-enhancing knowledge. It is not surprising that no ordinary philosophical school would be founded on the exiguous negativism of Scepti- cism. Pyrrho did, however, have one disciple, Timon of Phlius (c.320–c.230), who travelled to Elis as a young man and later arrived in Athens to challenge the prevailing dog- matisms in the spirit of his master. Timon crafted his attacks on dogmatists in the form of silloi, or satirical poems, some fragments of which survive. The principal development within Scepticism in the third century was its introduction into Plato’s *Academy by Arcesilaus. Since the prevailing dogmatism of the day was *Stoicism, Arcesilaus and the Academic Sceptics directed their increasingly refined destructive arguments against Stoic claims in theology and ethics. We do not know to what extent Arcesilaus was influenced by Pyrrho or whether he was in contact with Timon, but the inspir- ation for these Sceptical attacks was not Pyrrho so much as it was Socrates, understood by the Sceptics as one of their own. He was for them, in word and deed, a model of how one ought to respond to dogmatic assertions and of the results of such a response. The most famous of the Academic Sceptics after Arcesi- laus was Carneades. The historical evidence suggests that Carneades developed an epistemological theory of prob- abilism which apparently aimed to mitigate the extreme alternatives—certain knowledge or ignorance—of Pyrrhonian Scepticism. A reversion to dogmatism within the Academy, that is, to Platonism, in the first century bc ended with a revival of Pyrrhonism by Aenesidemus, whose version of Scepti- cism is partially preserved by the great chronicler of Scep- ticism, Sextus Empiricus. Scepticism can be either global or local. That is, one can be a sceptic regarding knowledge in general or only regarding a particular area of knowledge. The later history of scepticism is replete with attempts to combine a local scepticism, say regarding religious knowledge, with vig- orous knowledge-claims in other areas, such as science. 842 scepticism, history of Such an approach has even been embraced by defenders of religion, who want to claim that religious faith is beyond the reach of that which is scientifically knowable. l.p.g. J. Annas and J. Barnes (eds.), The Modes of Scepticism: Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations (Cambridge, 1985). J. Barnes, The Toils of Scepticism (Cambridge, 1990). M. Burnyeat (ed.), The Skeptical Tradition (Berkeley, Calif., 1983). L. Groarke, Greek Scepticism (Montreal, 1990). Schacht, Richard (1941– ). American philosopher; Pro- fessor of Philosophy, Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Schacht’s writings make room for some understanding between philosophers writing in the ‘analytical’ tradition and so- called ‘modern continental philosophy’. Notably, Nietz- sche (1983) presents arguments for and against that philosopher’s perspectivism and repudiation of Western morality in an idiom that is not Nietzschean but which preserves many of Nietzsche’s insights. In Alienation (1971), Hegel and After: Studies in Continental Philosophy between Kant and Sartre (1975), and Classical Modern Philoso- phers: Descartes to Kant (1984), Schacht has made Anglo- American philosophers more aware of the need to read modern European philosophers. s.p. *Nietzsche. Scheler, Max (1874–1928). German philosopher called ‘the Catholic Nietzsche’. He applied Husserl’s phenome- nology to ethics, culture, and religion. He was a founder of philosophical *anthropology and of sociology of know- ledge (Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge (1926); tr. Lon- don, 1980). In Formalism in Ethics and the Non-Formal Ethics of Values (1913–16; tr. Evanston, Ill., 1973), he argued (against Kant etc.) that values are objective, unchanging, a priori, non-formal, and objects of emotions and feelings rather than reason. Values form a hierarchy: (1) pleas- ure–pain (values of sensible feeling), (2) noble–vulgar (values of vital feeling), (3) beautiful–ugly, just–unjust, pure knowledge of truth (spiritual values), and (4) holy– unholy (religious values). Moral values consist in the real- ization of other values. Our feeling for values and their social embodiment, but not values themselves, vary in sociologically explicable ways. A person is not a substance nor an object, but the concrete unity of acts. He is essen- tially both individual and a member of a community. Most persons lack feeling for higher values, and cannot partici- pate in the types of community devoted to them; but all should have adequate, and perhaps equal, access to what they do value. Values are better promoted by aristocracy than by liberal democracy. m.j.i. M. S. Frings, Max Scheler: A Concise Introduction into the World of a Great Thinker (Pittsburgh, 1965). R. Perrin, Max Scheler’s Concept of the Person: An Ethics of Humanism (Basingstoke, 1991). Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775–1854). German philosopher, who was the Proteus of post-Kantian *idealism and the main philosopher of the Romantic circle. His earliest works, from 1793 on, were variations on Fichte’s *Wissenschaftslehre, though he contrasted idealism and ‘dogmatism’ less sharply than Fichte. From 1797 he produced several works on philosophy of nature, which attempt to ‘construct’ or ‘deduce’ nature as the ‘objective system of reason’. For Fichte and Kant, nature, though objective in relation to the finite ego, is a product of ‘consciousness in general’. Thus, as a book bears the mark of its author, *nature will be an organic whole tend- ing to the realization of *reason. Fichte initially believed that Schelling was trying to establish this, as a supplement to Wissenschaftslehre. Nature begins in the emergence of matter from the forces of attraction and repulsion and ends in the human organism, the embodiment of practical reason: nature is the I, or mind, in the process of becom- ing. Every natural phenomenon has its place in a logically ordered system of development. Schelling, like Goethe, rejects quantitative, mechanical science, and stresses life, the organic, purpose, and polarity (especially electricity and magnetism). Schelling’s next (un-Fichtean) step was to view philoso- phy of nature and Wissenschaftslehre as two parallel sci- ences, respectively deriving mind from nature and nature from mind. The System of Transcendental Idealism (1800; tr. Charlottesville, Va., 1978) develops theoretical and practical Wissenschaftslehre, in which, respectively, the con- scious is determined by the unconscious and the uncon- scious by the conscious. The theoretical self surveys the productivity of unconscious reason in feeling, perception, and thought; the practical self freely transforms this unconscious reality in individual morality, political life, and history. But both these series are endless; reason is here realized only at infinity. It is fully realized only in the unconscious, yet conscious, activity of the artistic genius: art is the true ‘organ’ of philosophy. He expanded this view in lectures on Philosophy of Art (1802–5, pub. 1859; tr. Minneapolis, 1989). Schelling next sought a common basis for nature and the self, for philosophy of nature and transcendental ideal- ism, i.e. a system of ‘identity’. In Exposition of my System of Philosophy (1801), this basis is ‘absolute reason’, the ‘indif- ference of nature and spirit, of object and subject’. He acknowledges its affinity to Spinoza’s substance. The Absolute is the quantitative indifference of reality and idea- lity. Reality or objectivity predominates over ideality or subjectivity in the real series: it runs from matter, via light, electricity, and chemistry, to the organism, the most spir- itual phase (or ‘potency’) of nature. Subjectivity predomin- ates in the ideal series, running from morality and science to art, the most natural phase of spirit. The full manifesta- tion of the Absolute, the universe, is a perfect organism and work of art. In Bruno (1802; tr. Albany, NY, 1984) the Absolute is called ‘God’ or the ‘infinite’, and the potencies are seen as (Neo)-platonic ‘ideas’, God’s eternal vision of himself, the intermediary between the Absolute and the empirical world. In 1804 Schelling came to believe that though the world can be shown to be rational in its content, no rational Schelling, Friedrich 843 account can be given of its existence, of why there is any- thing rather than nothing. The finite world originates from God not by a rational, comprehensible process but by a leap, a free (timeless) fall of the ideas from God into finite actuality. The content of reality is rational, embody- ing God’s ideas; its being actual (nature) is apostasy, sin, unreason. Nature’s essence strives to return to God, and this return is history: its goal is to reunite the ideas to God. Man’s development is parallel to God’s: he freely breaks loose from God and is redeemed by returning to him. Of Human Freedom (1809; tr. Chicago, 1937) postulates a ‘primordial ground’ or ‘abyss’ in God, which is indetermin- ate, unconscious striving or *will; all reality is ultimately will. This self-directed will creates as its self-image or self- revelation the ideas, reason. The world proceeds from the interaction between the ground and ideas. Nature reveals the conflict between irrational striving and rational pur- pose. History displays the triumph of man’s rational uni- versal will over his irrational particular will. Reality develops from primordial will to rational self-knowledge and self-determination. Religion, not art, is now the organ of philosophy. God develops in the successive ideas that men have of him. In lectures on mythology (1842) and revelation (1842–3), Schelling seeks knowledge of God from the history of all religions: God’s self-revelation and -development advances from primordial will to reason and love. Schelling’s and Hegel’s earlier ‘negative philosophy’ showed only that if God reveals himself, he does so in cer- tain rationally comprehensible forms. The new ‘positive philosophy’ is needed to show that he reveals himself in man’s religious history. Schelling had a mind of great depth and range, capable of original insights as well as of fusing those of others (the Neoplatonists, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, etc.). Many of his ideas re-emerge in Schopenhauer, Tillich, and Exis- tentialism: Schelling’s God is both the will to power and existentialist man. m.j.i. *romanticism, philosophical. A. Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduc- tion (London, 1993). F. Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vii: Modern Philosophy, pt. 1: Fichte to Hegel (Westminster, Md., 1963). M. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom (Athens, Oh., 1985). schema. Literally shape, pattern, form; plural, schemata or schemas. In logic a schema is an expression, often a sen- tence, from which certain word-groups have been removed and replaced by blanks or more commonly by ‘schematic letters’, the role of these being to mark places where any word-group of the type removed can be inserted: e.g. ‘P’, ‘F’, ‘G’ in ‘If not P, P; therefore P’, ‘G belongs to some F’, ‘ ∃x(Fx Gx)’ (‘Something is F and G’). Some schemata are *formulae, i.e. contain no words. But there are also formulae with meanings, e.g. the true sen- tence ‘ ∀x(x = x)’ (‘Everything is the same as itself ’) or the functional expression ‘ π 2 ’; whereas schemata mean noth- ing—and so cannot, for example, be true or false—until their letters are replaced or (as some say) interpreted. The role of a schematic letter is different from that of a quan- tifiable *variable, although the same letter might be assigned both roles at once. c.a.k. W. V. Quine, Methods of Logic, 3rd edn. (London, 1974). Schiffer, Stephen (1940– ). American philosopher (D.Phil., Oxford) currently at New York University, best known for his three books on meaning and for his quest for rigour and clarity. In Meaning he defended the view that *semantics reduces to propositional-attitude psychol- ogy, by presenting an intricate version of *Grice’s inten- tion-based semantics. He later repudiated this view in Remnants of Meaning, where he argued against the very possibility of a theory of *meaning or *propositional atti- tude content. He subsequently found a new possibility for such a theory, based on a distinctively deflationary but anti-reductionist, or ‘pleonastic’, conception of meanings and propositions. This theory is developed in The Things We Mean. Schiffer is also known for having introduced and later debunked the ‘hidden-indexical theory’ of proposi- tional attitude ascriptions. Other papers treat such topics as the nature of desire, Descartes on his essence, rigid des- ignation, singular thought, ‘Kripkenstein’ (Kripke’s rendi- tion of Wittgenstein on rules and private language), epistemic contextualism, and vagueness. k.b. Stephen Schiffer, Meaning (Oxford, 1972). —— Remnants of Meaning (Cambridge, Mass., 1987). —— The Things We Mean (Oxford, 2003). Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von (1759–1805). German philosopher, poet, and dramatist, who developed Kant’s ethics and aesthetics towards post-Kantian *ideal- ism. His main concern was the role of art and beauty in man’s rational life and its history. (He became Professor of History at Jena in 1789, and wrote several historical works, besides his inaugural lecture: What is, and to what End does one Study, Universal History?) On the basis of Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) he argued that *beauty is ‘freedom in phenomenal appearance’. Aesthetic contemplation of an object does not involve cognitively understanding it: we do not apply concepts to it or investigate its causal condi- tions, but view it as if it were free. The beautiful, again, is not an object of desire or moral will. In aesthetic contem- plation the ‘play impulse’ prevails. *Aesthetics, rather than (as Kant supposed) religion, plays the central part in educating the sensuous nature of man to morality. Art and beauty refine man’s feelings, so that he is more inclined to act legally, and thus prepare him for morality. In On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795; tr. Oxford, 1967) he envisaged an advance, both in the life of the individual and in the history of man, from the physical state in which man is ruled by needs and nature, by way of the aesthetic state, in which he frees himself from nature by the elimination of his sensuous will, to the moral state, in which man controls nature by his moral will. But aes- thetics also perfects man’s moral condition. By ennobling ∨ 844 Schelling, Friedrich his sensuous nature, beauty reconciles the conflict between it and his rational will. Thus man becomes a ‘beautiful soul’ (schöne Seele), who fulfils the moral law from inclination. In Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1796; tr. New York, 1966) he argues that different ages and types of poetry depend on different relations between nature and free- dom. In the ‘Arcadian’ stage (Greece) nature and freedom are in primitive harmony: men act morally by uncon- scious instinct and poetry is naïve. Modern poetry feels a conflict between nature and freedom, the real and the ideal, and strives to reconcile it: sentimental poetry. In the ‘Elysian’ age to come, when harmony is reflectively restored, poetry will be at once naïve and sentimental. m.j.i. R. D. Miller, Schiller and the Ideal of Freedom (Oxford, 1970). T. J. Reed, Schiller (Oxford, 1991). A. Ugrinsky (ed.), Friedrich von Schiller and the Drama of Human Existence (London, 1988). Schlegel, Friedrich von (1772–1829). Central in the Ger- man Romantic movement and responsible for converting the classical notion of irony, as a mere figure of speech, into an entire literary or quasi-philosophical perspective that named *Socrates among its antecedents. Early influ- enced by Kant and Fichte, Schlegel criticized the former for failing to bring ideas into touch with reality and the lat- ter’s world-creating ego for leaving out nature and his- tory. Schlegel’s views on irony nevertheless draw upon Fichte’s view of philosophy as animated by the thoughts and counter-thoughts generated by reflection. Philosophy is a reflective art, as with Socrates, and its goal is to bring the real and the ideal into touch with each other on a broad front (poetry, art, society, politics, literary commu- nication). Irony as reflective freedom raises the thinker to a sense of transcendence and of the divinely creative spirit. A convert to Roman Catholicism, Schlegel saw history as a process in which irreducibly single individuals, nations, and languages found their universal nature in the know- ledge of God. He founded The Athenaeum, a periodical of the early Romantics, and was for a time a politician. a.h. F. Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, tr. E. Behler and R. Stone (University Park, Pa., 1968). —— Lucinde and the Fragments, tr. P. Firchow (Minneapolis, 1971). Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst-Daniel (1768–1834). German Protestant theologian and philosopher of reli- gion. Translator of Plato. Inventor of *hermeneutics in its modern form. Religion is properly understood by intu- ition and feeling (Anschauung und Gefühl) and ‘a sense and taste for the infinite’, rather than through reason or doc- trine. In his philosophy of the person Schleiermacher emphasizes the dependence of each of cognition, feeling, and action on the other two. In his theology, God is the highest and only unity of what is. All particular things are disclosed only through God. The deepest awe at the exist- ence of the universe as a whole is possible only through a feeling of devotion. The profound experience of union with the infinite implies the existence of God. Christianity is not the only true religion, but the most complete. Schleiermacher accepted Kant’s critique of arguments for the existence of God, took seriously his construal of God, freedom, and the immortality of the soul as ‘postu- lates’, and was positively influenced by the Romantic movement, especially by *Schlegel. Until the renewed emphasis placed upon Scripture by Karl Barth, Schleier- macher’s influence on Protestant theology was immense. s.p. Wilhelm Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers, 2nd edn. (Berlin, 1920). Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, tr. John Oman with an introduction by Rudolf Otto (New York, 1958). —— Werke [selections], ed. O. Braun (Leipzig, 1910–13). Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (ed.), The Hermeneutics Reader (Oxford, 1986), esp. 72–97. Schlick, Friedrich Albert Moritz (1882–1936). In 1922 Schlick, a physicist turned philosopher, became Professor of the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences in Vienna (a predecessor had been Mach), where he became the centre of a group of like-minded advocates of logical and scien- tific rigour in philosophy, the Vienna Circle. Out of their discussions grew *Logical Positivism, the most profound and creative (though ultimately mistaken) school of phil- osophy in the twentieth century. But Schlick was not alto- gether typical of the Circle. Of course, he shared the view that science had a unique status, but he also included ethics in science by analysing value-judgements as desires, and therefore as psychological facts. But further develop- ment of his ideas was tragically denied to him, when in mid-career he was murdered on his way to a lecture by an insane student. a.bel. Oswald Hanfling, Logical Positivism (Oxford, 1981). —— (ed.), Essential Reading in Logical Positivism (Oxford, 1981). scholasticism. The philosophy of the ‘schools’, i.e. the tradition which arose in the medieval universities and is associated with the methods and theses of the major philosophers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, namely, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham. Scholasticism remained the dominant European philosophy until the fif- teenth century, when it gave way to, in turn, Renaissance humanism, rationalism, and empiricism. There have, however, been several revivals, and *neo-scholasticism remains a feature of the philosophical landscape. j.hal. *medieval philosophy. N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny, and J. Pinborg (eds.), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1982). Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860). German philosopher of inherited independent means, who gained distinction only towards the end of his life as a result, partly, of the notice taken of him in the British utilitarian journal the Westminster Review. His mother, who thoroughly disliked her son for his gloomy outlook, ran a literary salon in Weimar, frequented by Goethe, and this led to a short Schopenhauer, Arthur 845 period of intellectual friendship during Schopenhauer’s youth, as Goethe initially thought Schopenhauer’s philoso- phy relevant for his own theory of colours. Schopenhauer arrived at his general philosophical position very early and all his works are developments of the same basic initial ideas. His chief inspirations were Plato, Kant, and the *Upanishads. He is, in fact, the first (and remains among the few) Western philosophers to have related his thought to Hindu and Buddhist ideas. However, his most distinct- ive contribution to philosophy is in his insistence that *Will is more basic than thought in both man and nature. 1. Schopenhauer’s starting-point for his solution to ‘the riddle of the world’ is a form of transcendental *idealism which he owes to Kant, though he seeks to establish it in a less contorted way. The physical world is phenomenal and exists only for ‘the subject of knowledge’. Only by rec- ognizing this can we explain how we know certain neces- sary *synthetic a priori truths about it. Our cognitive faculties construct the world on the basis of four versions of the ‘principle of *sufficient reason’, to which all phe- nomena must conform. (This is elaborated most fully in the book of his early youth, On the Fourfold Root of the Prin- ciple of Sufficient Reason (1813).) Our sensibility operates with the principle that everything is situated in a space of which the parts are mutually determining according to Euclidean geometry, and a time the mutual conditioning of whose moments is the topic of arithmetic (via the tem- poral nature of counting); our understanding works with the law of causality, and yields perception of a physical world which it pictures as the cause of our sensations. Our reason—whose conceptual representations (Vorstellungen) are quite secondary to the representations which under- standing produces in perception and from which they are abstracted (Schopenhauer particularly scorns the many philosophers who confuse these or, like Hegel, treat con- cepts as primary)—works on the principle that every judgement must have its justification. A fourth principle bids us conceive of human action as necessarily deter- mined by motive. The world constructed on these prin- ciples can only exist for the subject of knowledge to whose faculties they correspond. 2. Matters are taken further in Schopenhauer’s magnum opus The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818)). Kant’s greatest merit, for Schopen- hauer, was the distinction of the phenomenon from the *thing-in-itself. He was also right (though not consist- ently) that the thing-in-itself is not the cause of our sensa- tions or of phenomena, since causation applies only within the phenomenal world and cannot relate it to something else. But that, for Schopenhauer, does not mean that we can form no idea of the nature of the thing- in-itself. For our perceptual experience of the phenomenal world of things in space and time is not our only experi- ence. We are aware of ourselves, both in the perceptual fashion by which we know external things, and, quite dif- ferently, ‘from within’ as Will, more specifically as Will to Live. So our behaviour presents itself to us not only as the movements of a physical object but more intimately as the phases of a Will. The latter is not, and is not felt to be, the cause of the behaviour; rather, these are the same thing known outwardly and inwardly. From knowledge of my own nature as thing-in-itself I can infer something of the nature of the physical world in general. For while I cannot prove that the rest of nature is more than mere appearance, namely the appearance of something in itself, to deny this would be a form of *solip- sism, something which belongs only to the madhouse. If we are to look upon the world sanely, we must suppose that everything in it is the appearance of what in itself is Will in basically the same sense as is my body and its behav- iour. This argument is treated by some commentators with less respect than it deserves. If it is true that my body is Will in its real inner being, then, since the physical world outwardly seems homogeneous with it, and belongs to the same unitary interacting system, it is reasonable to sup- pose that the same is true of physical nature, not only in other humans and animals, as is quite easily granted, but throughout. The reasonable doubt is whether Schopen- hauer has shown that Will is the inner being of my organ- ism and behaviour, rather than the justification of extending this conclusion to the world at large. 3. The natural world, then, is the appearance of Will to itself, when this generates the subject of knowledge as an affection of itself. But is it one Will or many which appears to itself as the organic and inorganic world? Schopenhauer takes the former view (as Nietzsche was later to take the latter). For, so he argues, number, as an operation of the human intellect, only applies to the world of representa- tion and cannot be relevant to reality as it is in itself. This cannot, then, be many, but must be one, not, indeed, in the sense that this would be the upshot of a count, but in the sense that number is inapplicable. (Whether this gives him the oneness he requires is doubtful.) He could have argued more effectively, however, that since causality cannot apply to reality in itself, it cannot figure there as ‘the cement of the universe’ (in Mackie’s phrase) and that the unity of the cosmos must not depend upon such exter- nal relations between its parts. But if what each of us experiences as his own inner being is Will at all, surely it is Will as a series of acts of will- ing, something both temporal and plural? Schopenhauer, more especially in the greatly enlarged second edition (1844) of his great work, is alert to this problem. It only shows, he says, that the thing-in-itself is still revealing itself incompletely, and has divested itself only of the more external garments in which it is dressed by consciousness. In fact, there seems some oscillation between the claim (characteristic later of Nietzsche) that introspectible processes of desire, pleasure and pain, and so forth are what I find as the inner being of myself and the claim that I can detect at the core of my being a dim unvarying drive to satisfaction. No reading of the text makes him altogether consistent on such matters. But the general upshot, that the universe is a single, ‘vast’, cosmic Will to 846 Schopenhauer, Arthur Exist which experiences itself through an apparent diver- sity of conscious beings in a spatio-temporal and deter- ministic world, is clear enough and strongly argued. This Will is said to be unconscious in inanimate nature, but it is hard to see how one can understand Schopenhauer unless it is supposed that it has some sort of dumb feeling of itself, even if there is not the contrast between subject and object required for consciousness in any full sense. 4. More than anything else, Schopenhauer is famous as the philosopher of *pessimism. The wretchedness of the world (with whose horrors he became obsessed early in life) and the nastiness of human nature, he contends, with many striking examples, is evident enough empirically. But it is also a necessary truth, following from the very nature of its underlying reality, the Will. Will seeks con- stantly for a quietus which from its very nature as striving it could only reach by forfeiting its main goal, existence; indeed pleasure has really only a negative character as the relief from the suffering which is its normal state. More- over, in its apparent pluralization, each part of the phe- nomenal world is powered by a drive to survive at the expense of others, so that there is a universal and appalling war of all against all. This is no time to consider the psy- chological sources of Schopenhauer’s extreme pessimism, nor weigh its pros and cons empirically; we remark only that, central as it was to his philosophy as he conceived it, it does not seem entailed by his most interesting meta- physical conclusions. It is not so obvious as he thought that a world of Will must have been one of misery, while some have found it possible to delight in a world thus con- ceived even with the miseries actually pertaining to it. 5. Glum as his view of the world is, Schopenhauer offers two ways of escape from its horrors, one temporary, the other in principle permanent. First, there is aesthetic experience, Schopenhauer’s detailed and brilliant account of which has had consider- able influence. Here our faculty of knowledge, in particu- lar perception, normally only an instrument to the Will’s satisfaction, gains a certain independence as pure will-less contemplation for its own sake, freeing us briefly from our misery, while the veil which hides the true nature of real- ity from us is partially rent. We no longer experience our- selves as one individual standing in contrast to others, but rather as the impersonal and universal pure subject of knowledge. And with this change in our experience of ourselves goes a change in the character of the object pre- sented to us. It is no longer particular things in space and time which present themselves, but rather the basic types and principles by which the Will manifests itself, types and principles which Schopenhauer identifies with the Pla- tonic Ideas, believing that he is uncovering the true signif- icance of Plato’s doctrine. There is a distinct law, or system of laws, of nature which is the phenomenal mani- festation of each of these (the laws of physics, of chem- istry, of biology, etc., and of each animal species, a partially distinct one also for every human being consti- tuting his innate character). The artist produces a percep- tual representation which yields us awareness of these Ideas (Ideen) rather than of the particular thing before us. (Music alone depicts the Will in its various grades as it is in itself rather than as manifested in the phenomenal world.) Aspects of this account are puzzling. Why are aesthetic contemplation, and its peaceful objects, so free of the trav- ails essential to Will, if they really bring us closer to the real- ity underlying phenomena? And in what sense does the Will objectify itself in these different grades? Schopen- hauer often writes as though this objectification was a kind of real entry into all the variety of the world’s phenomena, but he should be referring not to a real pouring of itself into an external world, but to the way in which the one Will manifests itself to itself, qua subject of knowledge. The only lasting solution, however, to our misery comes when people become so aware of the necessary wretchedness of life, of the misery of existing as futile manifestations of the cosmic Will to Live, that they lose all wish for existence and gratification. This is what happens in the case of the genuine saint, an ascetic who has no con- cern with living and prospering. In him the Will to Live has denied itself. Or rather, there is only a faint twinkling of it left, hardly enough to sustain the picture of a world of things in space and time. When he dies this twinkling will utterly cease, and with it the world of which he was con- scious, since this consisted in nothing but his picture of it. For Will and its picture of the world cannot continue to be when it no longer desires, and the world cannot be when the Will ceases, since it is only the Will’s own delusive picture of itself. But surely the Will as personalized in me, and the world for me, end equally, when I die, whether I have reached will-denying sainthood or not, while in both cases the Will continues its life in others and in nature? The answer seems to be that, when the saint dies, his particular grade or type of Will is at an end, whereas when the ordinary man dies, though he is at an end, his type is not. (Thus sui- cide is self-defeating, a mere complaint over current con- ditions on the part of one particular grade of Will.) Moreover, universal sainthood would somehow bring everything to an end (though the real truth here must be somehow non-temporal). Will anything be left at all? Yes, Schopenhauer darkly hints, something inconceivable by us but experienced by the saint in mystic contemplation. For what is nothing from one point of view must always be something from another. The analysis of nothing here is similar to Bergson’s. Schopenhauer’s ethics (On the Freedom of the Will and On the Basis of Morality, published together in 1841) is closely related to his metaphysics. It is prefaced by a critique of Kant’s account of morality. For Schopenhauer the very idea of a categorical, as opposed to a hypothetical, impera- tive, is an absurdity. An intelligible imperative is nor- mally an order given by someone who can impose sanc- tions on those who do not conform to it, and has the form of ‘Do this . . . or else’. Schopenhauer believed that the *categorical imperative only seemed to make sense to Schopenhauer, Arthur 847 Kant because unconsciously he took it as the command of God. Moreover, in spite of himself Kant comes too near to giving ethics an egoistic foundation, effectively basing it, claims Schopenhauer, on our concern with how it would affect us personally if everyone acted according to our example. In contrast, moral goodness is identified by Schopen- hauer with unselfish compassion for others. The good man is one who, not making the usual distinction between himself and others, is filled with universal compassion. Thus he acts on the principle ‘Injure no one; on the con- trary, help everyone as much as you can’. In doing so, he is concretely aware of what metaphysics teaches in the abstract, the oneness of the Will in all its manifestations. Thus this principle is not really an imperative but rather a description of how the good man acts. As an instruction it would really be useless, because each man acts according to his innate character anyway. So-called moral education may make men more tolerable by pointing out the advan- tages of co-operation with others, but our behaviour can only possess true moral worth if it stems from a moral goodness which cannot be taught. That moral worth con- sists in this capacity for compassion has hardly been rec- ognized by most official moralists, but all over the world nothing is really admired in a morally relevant way except genuine concern with the welfare of others. The compassion which constitutes moral worth mani- fests itself in its lesser form in justice based on the principle of non-interference with anyone’s obtaining by their activity what they would otherwise legitimately achieve by it. By an illegitimate achievement is meant one made at the expense of someone else’s achieving what they would otherwise—judged by the same criterion—legitimately achieve by their action. It manifests itself in a fuller form, as the loving kindness which inspires an active concern to help others in their need. It should be noted that for Schopenhauer the goal of compassion is the relief of mis- ery and does not include the creation of positive happi- ness. This is partly because his pessimistic view of life implies that positive happiness, as opposed to relief from the worst sort of unhappiness, is impossible, and partly because he thinks that the kind of identification with others which constitutes compassion can only occur when one becomes aware of another as a fellow sufferer. Schopenhauer’s treatment of the freedom of the will is a brilliant (if ultimately implausible) development of Kant’s. For Schopenhauer universal *determinism holds necessarily for the phenomenal world. This follows from the fact that consciousness constructs the world on the principle of sufficient reason, in particular in its causal form. However, the thing-in-itself has freely chosen to manifest itself as a phenomenal individual answering to the particular Platonic Idea which constitutes each human being’s character. This character (just like one of the laws of nature) settles just what he will do in every possible empirical circumstance. Each action is causally deter- mined in that it flows necessarily from the combination of the agent’s character and his beliefs about the conse- quences of acting in one way rather than another. The beliefs are the cause of the action, but, like all other causes, they operate because they affect something with a deter- minate nature. At the level of causation specific to physics it is only the determinate nature of matter in general that is involved, while chemistry and biology explore the type of causation which arises in matter which has reached a higher level of complexity. The causation of human activ- ity is just as inevitable, but there is no one single set of causal laws, because each single human has a quite unique determinate nature. This is his moral character, the special quality of his will. It is this which is the ultimate possessor or otherwise of moral worth. A man is blamed not so much for what he does, but for what his action shows that he is. This cannot change, because all change in a man’s outward behaviour arises from causes which can only operate on him in consequence of his unchanging basic character. Causes only affect him as they do in virtue of his character and therefore cannot act on it. Nevertheless, qua the thing-in-itself or Will which has chosen to manifest itself in an individual with my particular character, I am to blame for what I am and do, and deserve whatever fate this brings me. The only behaviour which does not thus follow deterministically from an individual’s innate char- acter, operating in particular conditions, occurs in those rare cases when a saint reaches liberation; while his char- acter and its consequences manifested the Will’s futile but free assertion of itself, his liberation manifests the Will’s wiser and equally free return to the mysterious Nothing- ness whence it emerged thereby. t.l.s.s. translations On the Basis of Morality (1841), tr. E. F. J. Payne (Indianapolis, 1965). On the Freedom of the Will (1841), tr. K. Kolenda (Indianapolis, 1960). The World as Will and Representation (1818), tr. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York, 1966). commentaries Michael Fox (ed.), Schopenhauer: His Philosophical Achievement (Brighton, 1980). Patrick Gardiner, Schopenhauer (Harmondsworth, 1963). D. W. Hamlyn, Schopenhauer (London, 1980). Christopher Janaway, Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (Oxford, 1989). —— Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2002). —— (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge, 2000). B. Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, expanded edn. (Oxford, 1997). T. L. S. Sprigge, Theories of Existence (Harmondsworth, 1985), ch. 4. Schrödinger: see cat, Schrödinger’s. Schutz, Alfred (1899–1959). German philosopher, who emigrated to the USA, a pupil of the phenomenologist Husserl. In the philosophy of *social science, he is taken to be a key critic of the positivist tradition (although he saw himself as building bridges between *positivism and the *hermeneutic and *phenomenological traditions). In 848 Schopenhauer, Arthur The Phenomenology of the Social World (first German edn. 1932; Evanston, Ill., 1967), Schutz analysed the process by which we typify the basic stream of meaningless sense- experience into ‘stocks of knowledge’, which are shared. Together all stocks of knowledge constitute the ‘life- world’ (our reality and our knowledge of it are one and the same). Social scientists produce ‘second-order typifica- tions’. Schutz’s analysis was developed by phenomeno- logical sociologists into a social scientific methodology which takes ‘scientific knowledge’ to have only the same status as the common-sense knowledge of the life-world possessed by us all. e.j.f. M. Natanson, ‘Phenomenology and Typification: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz’, Social Research (1970). science, diversity of. The tentative view that science is a network of theories that mutually support and partially explain each other and do not have a privileged founda- tional level—say, physics. Opposed to kinds of *founda- tionalism and *unity of science, which arrange science hierarchically, with theories at the higher levels depend- ent on and to be explained by those below. The view of science as diverse is thus also opposed to kinds of *reduc- tionism. It may, further, also resist the physicalism that reduces all science to physical science. As a full account of science, the view needs to develop generalizations about kinds of evidential relations, etc. between theories, but it remains pessimistic that true bridging laws between sci- ences will be established. v.such. John Dupré, The Disorder of Things (Cambridge, Mass., 1993). Margaret Morrison, Unifying Scientific Theories: Physical Concepts and Mathematical Structures (Cambridge, 2000). science, feminist philosophy of. Would scientists with distinctively feminist commitments do science differ- ently? If the answer to this question is ‘yes’, does this mean that our conception of ‘scientificity’ must be adjusted? Feminists are not the only philosophers to have ques- tioned the demarcation of science from the ordinary run of knowledge, and therefore the philosophy of science from epistemology more generally. However, they have made a particularly significant contribution to the body of sceptical literature which asks whether conventional sci- entific methods and methodology are as successful at tracking or converging on truth and validity as they have claimed to be. Feminist philosophers have also engaged with the problem of establishing what methodologies, if any, might be guarantors of good science. They have con- sidered a number of candidates, including an adapted *his- torical materialism (Nancy Hartsock), *phenomenology (Dorothy E. Smith), and interactive observation processes (Evelyn Fox Keller). A principled rejection of a model of objectivity which relies on detachment is common to these various possibilities. Feminist philosophers do not suggest that only women could be successful scientists using such methodologies—methodology may be sys- tematically connected with gender, but not with sex. e.j.f. *knowledge and science; feminism; feminist philoso- phy. Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Milton Keynes, 1986). Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (New York, 1983). —— and Helen E. Longino (eds.), Feminism and Science (Oxford,1996). Nancy Tuana (ed.), Feminism and Science (Bloomington, Ind., 1989). science, history of the philosophy of. Ancient Greek artisans, including navigators, farmers, architects, mer- chants, blacksmiths, shipbuilders, physicians, and chron- iclers, were familiar with a great variety of materials, plants, animals, people, events. They dug tunnels, found ways to transport and to store perishable goods, and could identify and alleviate bodily and mental afflictions. They travelled across national boundaries and assimilated for- eign ideas and techniques. Archaeological discoveries show how much was known, for example, about the prop- erties of metals, their compounds and alloys, and how skil- fully this knowledge was used. An enormous amount of information resided in the customs, the industries, and the common sense of the time. Most Greeks took this abundance for granted. Not all of them were impressed by it. Aiming at something more profound, some early thinkers started the work of know- ledge all over again, this time without details but with increased explicitness and rigour. They were philosophers because they preferred words to things, speculation to experience, principles to rules of thumb, and they did not mind when their ideas conflicted with traditions and phe- nomena of the most obvious kind. They were also reli- gious and social reformers; they derided popular customs and beliefs, heaped scorn on the gods of tradition and replaced them by monsters (example: the God of Xeno- phanes, who is all thought and power, but lacks compas- sion). They were even scientists of sorts. They did not just pontificate, they argued for their views, and some of their ideas have survived until today. Thus Parmenides claimed that the world was one, that change and subdivision did not exist, and that the lives of human beings which contained both were a chimera. The proof (which he presents as being revealed by a goddess) rests on three assumptions said to be self-evident: that *being is (estin), that not-Being is not (ouk estin), and that nothing is more fundamental than Being. The argument then proceeds as follows: if change and difference exist, then there exists a transition from Being to not-Being (which is the only alternative); not-Being is not, hence change and difference are not either. We have here an early example of a *reductio ad absurdum—a type of rea- soning that extended the domain of demonstrable truths and separated it from intuition. The premiss, estin, is the first explicit conservation law—it asserts the conservation of Being. Used in the form that nothing comes from noth- ing, it suggested more special conservation laws such as science, history of the philosophy of 849 . force us to treat it as one hypothesis among others, thus needing the kind of defence appropri- ate to controversial hypotheses. But such certainties work differently from ordinary hypotheses view of the world. Many date the birth of ‘modern phil- osophy’ from the time when Descartes identified the defeat of scepticism as the first task of philosophy. Plato’s philosophy bequeathed an. game’ (para. 204). These certainties are man- ifested in the ways in which we react to evidence and to hypotheses, in our activities and our instinctive responses to the world. They are not expressed