society, organic: see organic society. sociobiology. Sociobiologists attempt to explain pat- terns of interaction in group-living organisms ranging from ants to human beings within the categories estab- lished by Darwin’s theory of natural selection and the mathematical theory of genetics. Of particular interest is the behaviour involved in herding, co-operation, aggres- sion, altruism, mate selection, and sexual exclusivity or non-exclusivity. Sociobiology is often criticized on the grounds that its explanatory hypotheses are not easily veri- fied, or that they reflect conventional, unexamined, or impossible assumptions, especially about natural patterns of behaviour for human beings. cath.w. *biology, philosophical problems of; evolutionary ethics. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (London, 1978). E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass., 1975). sociolect: see idiolect. sociology: see Adorno, Comte; Durkheim; Mead; Spencer; Weber. sociology of knowledge. This explores the social causes of the formation and diffusion of beliefs. Forerunners include Bacon, Comte, Nietzsche, Marx, and Engels. It was established as an independent discipline by Scheler and Mannheim, and also by anthropologists, such as Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl, studying the social causes of religions and ideologies. Natural science was generally credited with privileged access to reality and thus immun- ity to sociological explanation. This discrimination is unwarranted. If sociology gives sufficient conditions for beliefs without reference to their truth-value, it under- mines their claim to truth, leading to scepticism or rela- tivism. But this consequence is avoided if it gives only necessary conditions for the formation and spread of beliefs, conditions which need not determine the content of beliefs in detail, or if it explains the emergence and acceptance of a theory despite its being underdetermined by the evidence. In these cases, the truth of beliefs and/or evidence for it remains an essential part of their explan- ation, supplemented, but not excluded, by social factors. m.j.i. J. E. Curtis and J. W. Petras (eds.), The Sociology of Knowledge: A Reader (New York, 1970). Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociol- ogy of Knowledge (1929, tr. London, 1960). Max Scheler, Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge (1924, tr. London, 1980). Socrates (470–399 bc). Athenian philosopher, teacher of Plato. Socrates is one of the most significant yet most enig- matic figures in the history of philosophy: significant because his relation to Plato was crucial to the develop- ment of the latter, and thus indirectly to the development of much later philosophy; enigmatic because he wrote nothing himself, and therefore presents the challenge of reconstructing him from the evidence of others. It is there- fore necessary to start with a brief account of that evidence. Sources. Assuming the truth of the generally (though not universally) accepted view that all Plato’s dialogues were written after Socrates’ death, the only evidence from his own lifetime consists of references to him in Athenian comedy from the last quarter of the fifth century bc. While most of these are very brief, a sentence or so mentioning some singular trait such as Socrates’ loquacity, or his going barefoot, we have a full-scale portrayal in Aristophanes’ Clouds, first produced in 423, in which Socrates is a central character. Though this portrayal does preserve some traits of the actual Socrates as recorded elsewhere, such as his peculiar gait, it is recognized that the Socrates of the play is not a realistic portrait but a caricature of a representative ‘Sophist’ combining features of various individuals (e.g. the theory of the divinity of the air propounded by the con- temporary natural philosopher Diogenes of Apollonia) and of stock comic types, such as the half-starved Pythagorean ascetic. The fact that Aristophanes chose Socrates as a peg on which to hang this caricature shows that he was by then a comparatively well-known figure, and the dramatic circumstances of his condemnation and death (see below) gave rise to a considerable Socratic litera- ture, comprising both imaginative reproductions of his conversations and controversial works (some hostile, some favourable) focusing on his trial. Apart from frag- mentary remains of some other authors (e.g. Aeschines of Sphettus), the only substantial survivors of this literature are the dialogues of Plato and the Socratic writings of Xenophon, which include a version of his speech at his trial and purported ‘memoirs’ of various conversations. While these are in broad agreement with Plato in attributing to Socrates certain modes of argument (e.g. inductive argu- ments) and certain specific doctrines (e.g. that virtue is knowledge), their tone is much less speculative and their picture of Socrates much more conventional and practic- ally orientated than Plato’s, reflecting the different char- acters and interests of the respective authors. While Plato’s dialogues present a consistent and compelling por- trait of Socrates’ highly individual personality, his primary purpose in writing them was not that of a biographer (at least on the modern conception as a chronicler one of whose primary aims is historical accuracy). Rather, he writes as a philosophical apologist, who seeks to present Socrates as the ideal embodiment of philosophy, unjustly traduced by confusion with bogus practitioners (*Sophists) and unjustly condemned for his dedication to the philosophical life. It is, therefore, quite natural that he should in some places put into the mouth of Socrates doc- trines of his own which the historical Socrates did not hold (see below). In what are standardly regarded as his later dialogues the importance of the figure of Socrates dimin- ishes, and his role as a figure of philosophical authority is taken over by others, in some cases by impersonal figures 880 society, organic such as the Eleatic Visitor of the Sophist and Statesman and the Athenian of the Laws (traditionally regarded as Plato’s last dialogue, and the only one in which Socrates does not figure at all). It is reasonable to explain this progressive dis- appearance of Socrates as a reflection of the development of Plato’s views and methods in directions independent of the elder philosopher. Aristotle, who was born in 384 and came to Athens to study in the Academy in 367, must have derived his knowledge of Socrates primarily (though doubtless not exclusively) from Platonic sources. That is not, of course, to say that his only information was Plato’s dialogues; though some of his references to Socrates are clearly, and others possibly, to passages in the dialogues, there is ground for thinking that some are independent (see below). Life. Socrates spent all his life in Athens, apart from mili- tary service abroad. The sources represent him as spend- ing his time in philosophical discussion, and how he made his living is unclear; while there is a tradition that he fol- lowed (at least for a time) his father’s trade as a stone- mason, he may have depended largely on support from friends. Plato is emphatic that he never took money for philosophizing, and makes that a central point of differen- tiation between him and the (professional) Sophists. He was married to Xanthippe, whose bad temper (together with Socrates’ equanimity in putting up with it) became a stock element in a comic tradition which endured from antiquity to at least the nineteenth century. (For instance, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath tells how Socrates sat quietly when Xanthippe ‘caste pisse upon his heed’, merely remarking mildly, ‘Before the thunder stops the rain starts.’) If there is any factual basis to this legend it is worth noting that Xanthippe, who, as Plato recounts in the Phaedo, had two infant children at the time of Socrates’ death, must have been least thirty years younger than her husband, and also that Socrates’ life-style can hardly have made him a reliable bread-winner. Some ancient sources mention a second wife, or perhaps concubine, named Myrto; the comic tradition represents Socrates as living bigamously with her and Xanthippe (doubtless another source of irritation to the latter), but the historical basis is very dubious. The ‘intellectual autobiography’ which Plato puts into Socrates’s mouth in the Phaedo represents him as having been at one time keenly interested in natural philosophy, but as having become disillusioned by the neglect of teleo- logical explanation by its leading theorists. Assuming the historical accuracy of that account, his interests seem to have shifted to questions of conduct and especially of its fundamental principles, while the magnetism of his person- ality attracted to him a circle of mainly younger men, some of whom, including Plato and some of his relatives, were opposed to the Athenian democratic system. It is impossible to determine how far Socrates himself shared such views; however critical he may have been of democ- racy in theory, he was in practice a loyal citizen, serving with distinction on the battlefield and adhering strictly to his ideals of legality and justice under severe pressure, once under the democracy, when he was alone in oppos- ing an unconstitutional proposal in the Assembly, and once under the tyrannical regime which briefly ousted the democracy at the end of the Peloponnesian War, when he refused an order to participate in the arrest (and subse- quent death) of an innocent man. None the less, his asso- ciation with notorious anti-democrats, especially Alcibiades and Plato’s relatives Critias and Charmides, probably contributed, after the restoration of the democ- racy, to his indictment on vague charges of neglect of the state religion and corruption of the young, and to his con- demnation to death. In addition to Xenophon’s account of his trial (mentioned above) the events of his trial and its aftermath are immortalized in three of Plato’s works, the Apology (Defence) an idealized version of Socrates’ defence at his trial, Crito, which gives his reasons for refus- ing to take the opportunity (which was apparently avail- able) of escape from prison, and Phaedo, a moving re-creation of his final hours, containing first a Platonic treatise on the philosophy of life, death, and immortality and then a depiction of the ideal philosophic death. Philosophy. It cannot be doubted that Socrates was a major, perhaps the most significant, influence on Plato’s philosophical development, but the nature of this influ- ence is not altogether easy to determine. Because our main access to Socrates is via the works of Plato, we have the problem of determining what, if any, doctrines Socrates himself held (see above). One extreme position is that we can know nothing whatever about the views of the historical Socrates, another that whatever views Plato ascribes to Socrates in any dialogue were actually held by him. Neither seems to me tenable. Aristotle distinguishes the views of Plato from those of Socrates (Metaphysics 1078 b 27–32) by attributing to the former the theory of sep- arate *Forms, which, he says, Socrates did not hold. Since Socrates is represented as expounding that theory in the Phaedo and other dialogues, it is clear that Aristotle does not derive that information from the dialogues, and it is therefore plausible that he learned either from Plato him- self or from other sources in the Academy that the theory was Plato’s own. So not everything in the dialogues is Socratic. But is anything Socratic? In the same passage Aristotle ascribes to Socrates an interest in general defin- itions and the practice of inductive arguments, both of which we find attributed to Socrates by both Plato and Xenophon. Both the latter also attribute to Socrates the ‘Socratic paradoxes’ that virtue is wisdom or knowledge and that no one does wrong willingly. Though it is likely that Xenophon’s portrayal of Socrates is not totally inde- pendent of Plato’s, it is at least plausible that those methods of argument were employed, and those doc- trines held, by the historical Socrates. Though Socrates is represented as maintaining these doctrines by Plato, he figures in the dialogues, especially those generally regarded as early, not primarily as a dog- matic philosopher (indeed he was famous for claiming Socrates 881 that he was not wise in any respect), but as a critic, eliciting opinions from his interlocutors and subjecting them to critical scrutiny, usually producing a refutation by show- ing the doctrine in question to be inconsistent with other propositions agreed by both parties to be true. This ‘method of *elenchus’ (a Greek word meaning ‘examin- ation’) has obvious affinities with the argumentative strategies employed and taught by the Sophists, and Plato is concerned to stress that in Socrates’ hands it was intended not to produce victory in a debating contest, but to lead to genuine understanding by purging the person subjected to it of false beliefs. Philosophical inquiry con- ducted by this method is supposed to be not a contest between opponents (eristic), but a co-operative search for truth and understanding (*dialectic). Though Plato’s conception of the methods of dialectic clearly developed considerably in the course of his life (see above) the ideal of a co-operative critical inquiry, conducted by the spoken word, remained his paradigm of philosophy, and we have every reason to think that it was his memory of the power of Socratic conversations which gave that ideal its perennial attractiveness for him. Later influence. The influence of the figure of Socrates did not cease with Plato. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods the various schools (with the exception of the Epicureans) each sought to appropriate him as a patron saint, the Cynics appealing to his ascetic mode of life, the Sceptics and sceptical Academics to his profession of ignorance (see above), and the Stoics, notably Epictetus, to his alleged claim that virtue is the only intrinsic good. The Christian apologist Justin (second century ad) claimed him as a forerunner of Christ, a characterization which was revived in the fifteenth century by Neoplatonists such as Marsilio Ficino. In medieval Islam he was revered (though not well understood) as a sage and upholder of monotheism against idolatry. In the later Renaissance and in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment he came to be seen as a paradigm of human virtue and a martyr to rationalism at the hands of superstition. In different ways Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche saw him as a pivotal figure in the development of human thought and con- structed central aspects of their own thought in reaction to him, and in our own day he has been an important influ- ence on the later work of Foucault. It is no exaggeration to claim that as long as personal and intellectual integrity remain compelling ideals, Socrates will be a suitable embodiment of them. c.c.w.t. T. C. Brickhouse and N. D. Smith, The Philosophy of Socrates (Boul- der, Colo., 2000). B. S. Gower and M. C. Stokes (eds.), Socratic Questions (London, 1992). W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, iii (Cambridge, 1969), pt. 2. G. B. Matthews, Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy (Oxford, 1999). A. Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Fou- cault (Berkeley, Calif., 1998). C. C. W. Taylor, Socrates: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2000). P. A. Vander Waerdt (ed.), The Socratic Movement (Ithaca, NY, 1994). G. Vlastos (ed.), The Philosophy of Socrates (Garden City, NY, 1971). —— Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cambridge, 1991). Socratic method. The question-and-answer method of philosophizing (dialectic) used by Socrates in Plato’s early dialogues (e.g. Euthyphro), often in conjunction with pretended ignorance (Socratic irony), whereby a self- professed expert’s over-confident claim to knowledge is subverted. Sometimes the idea is to clear the mind for the subsequent development of more adequate views. More generally, Socratic method is any philosophical or peda- gogical method that disinterestedly pursues truth through analytical discussion. a.bel. *philosophical inquiry. Leonard Nelson, Socratic Method and Critical Philosophy (New York, 1965). Socratic paradox. Several claims put by Plato in the mouth of Socrates have been called ‘Socratic paradoxes’, but the one which the description fits best is the dictum ‘No one does wrong voluntarily’. This is more plausible in its Greek original, where the word translated ‘does wrong’ can also mean ‘misses the mark’. It implies that all wrong- doing is due to lack of knowledge, so that another version of the paradox is ‘Virtue is knowledge’. c.j.f.w. H. H. Benson, Essays on the Philosophy of Socrates (Oxford, 1992). soft determinism: see freedom and determinism. Sohravardı¯, Shiha¯b al-Dı¯n Yah . ya¯ (?–1191). Persian thinker whose Philosophy of Illumination was the first attempt to construct a consistent non-Aristotelian system in *Islamic philosophy. His intention was to improve upon the Avicennan system by avoiding its logical gaps; to uphold the rational validity of revealed knowledge; and to construct a unified epistemological system that would include ‘scientific’ explanations of inspirational as well as sense-perceived knowledge. The Philosophy of Illumination employs a specifically defined symbolic ‘language of Illumination’. Objects, depicted as lights, are inherently knowable because, as part of the propagated whole as continuum, they include essential light that may be ‘seen’ by subjects who, recover- ing their own essential lightness, become self-cognizant and capable of ‘seeing’ the object’s manifest light-essence. Sohravardı¯ redefined and refined problems pertaining to every domain of philosophical investigation. In logic, he defines the modal ‘necessary’ as an independent oper- ator to construct a superiterated modal proposition to which all other propositions are reduced. Most critically, he argues that Avicenna’s complete essentialist definition, deemed the first step in science, cannot be constructed, thus refuting the basis of Peripatetic scientific method. Similar to the impossibility of definition by extension through exhaustive enumeration of elements, he argues 882 Socrates that the thing’s essentials may not all be known when con- structing the formula. Further, he criticizes the universal proposition on the grounds that universal validity must be necessary and always true; but because of necessary future contingency (possible worlds), the formal validity of a ‘law’ deduced ‘now’ may be invalidated at some future time by the recovery of exceptions. The most prior, necessary, and always true knowledge thus cannot be predicative. Rather, it is *‘knowledge by presence’ when the ‘illuminationist’ relation between the subject and the object is actualized in durationless time. However, foun- dations must be renewed in all future time, or in other pos- sible worlds, based on future or other knowing subjects’ ‘observations’, thus according a principal role for the enlightened ‘observer’. h.z. John Walbridge, The Science of Mystic Lights: Qut . b al-Dı¯n Shı¯ra¯zı¯ and the Illuminationist Tradition in Islamic Philosophy (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1992). Hossein Ziai, Knowledge and Illumination: A Study of Suhrawardı¯’s H . ikmat al-Ishra¯q(Atlanta, 1990). solipsism. The view that only oneself exists. ‘Is anybody there?’ asks the visitor trapped in the waxworks museum after closing time, ‘Or is there only me?’ Philosophers raise eyebrows by discussing similar-sounding questions when there are no special circumstances. One debate is whether other creatures have an inner life (thoughts, wants, feel- ings) of the kind which makes the subject a person. Even if they do, is the inquirer in a position to know or reasonably believe that? This ‘problem of *other minds’ presents solipsism as an apparently inescapable conclusion from certain (Cartesian) assumptions, whereby access to others’ mental states is indirect, involving a dodgy inference from behaviour. A more radical version is that one’s own immediate experience has a fundamental, self-certifying reality and that comparable knowledge of ‘physical’ or ‘public’ items is unobtainable. This is sometimes anchored in the thought that, when a person loses consciousness, his whole world crashes. Arguments that cast doubt on the existence or accessibility of a mind-independent world leave us with no lifeline to the presence of others, no defence against the threat of solipsism. Characteristically, these sceptical arguments take a yet more radical turn when the link between grasping the meaning of words and being presented with examples is remembered. If I am never acquainted with your experi- ence and can gain no knowledge about it, how can I under- stand the words that allegedly refer to it? It seems to a solipsist that I have to learn what words refer to by con- necting them with items of my own experience. How can I even get the idea that there are things outside that experience? The world has to be my world. Counter-attacks often focus on what the sceptic keeps. In stating his view he may use ‘I’ or ‘my’, thus assuming a distinction between himself and others. But, if there are no other takers, what is meant by claiming that experience is mine? Where there is no possibility of others, the idea of signalling one person rather than another, presupposed in the normal use of ‘I’, seems to fail. For this reason, Lichtenberg’s famous suggestion that we should do better to say ‘It thinks’ rather than ‘I think’ finds favour with solip- sists. (Also, presumably, ‘It hurts’, ‘It chooses’, and so on.) In Philosophical Investigations, §§243ff., Wittgenstein seeks to undermine this further position by questioning the possibility that anyone could acquire a *private lan- guage. The need to observe a distinction between correct and incorrect judgement finally forces us to admit that lan- guage itself is essentially social. This seems to allow a return to the common-sense position that if the solipsist says anything, this ought to be an intelligible communica- tion; but that the thesis should be understood seems to be a possibility which it itself rules out. But if solipsism is absurd, discussing it is not. Solipsistic conclusions may be used as powerful reductio ad absurdum arguments against some common assumptions, and the interesting mistakes that generate solipsism also embody real insights into our language and thought. It leads us to reconsider how the words ‘I’ and ‘mine’ work, what the relation is between the relatively permanent objects around us and the testimony of our senses, and how we learn to speak about sensations. It also leads us to question common ideas about the primacy of private experience in fixing the meaning of words in general. There is method in the madness of losing your head when all about you are keeping theirs. j.e.r.s. *scepticism. A. J. Ayer, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (London, 1940), ch. 3. P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion, rev. edn. (Oxford, 1986), chs. 8–10. P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London, 1959), ch. 3. L. Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford, 1958), 44ff. Solovyov, Vladimir Sergeevich (1853–1900). Idealist philosopher and poet. Solovyov’s lectures on *‘Godman- hood’ at St Petersburg University in 1878 established him as Russia’s first significant academic philosopher (though he was forced out of academe after appealing for clemency for Alexander II’s assassins). Influenced by German idealism, Solovyov saw development as a progression from primitive unity through differentiation to a higher reintegration. The world of spatio-temporal objects was created when Sophia, or the world-soul, separated from God. Reintegration requires the establishment of ‘all-unity’: the reuniting of the world with God in a kingdom of heaven on earth. For a time, Solovyov envisioned a theocratic utopia with all Churches and nations united under the Pope and the Rus- sian Tsar. His later philosophy is more contemplative and less dogmatic, though prey to pessimism. Solovyov inspired a significant revival in Russian religious philosophy and influenced the Russian symbolist poets. d.bak. *Russian philosophy. V. S. Solovyov, A Solovyov Anthology, tr. N. Duddington (London, 1950). Solovyov, Vladimir 883 Song of God: see Bhagavadgı¯ta¯. sophism. A sophism is a type of *fallacy that is not just an error of reasoning, or an invalid argument, but a kind of tactic of argumentation used unfairly to try to get the best of a speech partner. Aristotle called these kinds of tactics sophistici elenchi, or sophistical refutations. For an example of a sophism, see the entry ‘straw man fallacy’. d.n.w. *fallacy. Douglas Walton, The Place of Emotion in Argument (University Park, Penn., 1992). Sophists. Itinerant professors of higher education. From its original senses of ‘sage’ and ‘expert’ (lit. ‘one who is wise’, from sophizesthai, cognate with sophos) the word came to be applied in the fifth century bc in the technical sense given above to a number of individuals who travelled widely through the Greek world, giving popular lectures and spe- cialized instruction in a wide range of topics. They were in no sense a school, or even a single movement. They had neither a common set of doctrines nor any shared organ- ization, and while our evidence indicates that some of them knew one another, their attitude to one another was rather that of professional rivals than colleagues. Their intellectual activities included the popularization of the Ionian tradition of inquiry into nature (which was concurrently being developed by more original thinkers such as Anaxagoras and the *Atomists) and mathematics. The polymath Hippias included both in his range of expert- ise, and Protagoras is reported to have written a work on mathematics, which may have included criticism of math- ematics from the standpoint of his subjectivist epistemol- ogy. The fifth century saw the development of what might broadly be called the ‘social sciences’ of history, geog- raphy, and speculative anthropology, as represented, for example, by the works of Hecataeus, Herodotus, and Thucydides; Hippias and probably Protagoras were also active in these fields. Another significant development in this period was the systematic study of techniques of per- suasion and argument, which included the beginnings of the study of language in various forms, including gram- mar, literary criticism, and semantics. In all these areas Protagoras seems to have been a pioneer; he was reputedly the first person to write a treatise on techniques of argu- ment, and was notorious for his claim, reported by Aristotle, to be able to ‘make the weaker argument the stronger’, a claim apparently based on the view that to every thesis there was opposed an equipollent contrary thesis. If all these have equal evidential support (a thesis logically inde- pendent of, but doubtless psychologically connected with, the famous doctrine that ‘Man is the measure of all things’ (cf. Protagoras)), then it is an appropriate task for the tech- nique of persuasion to devise arguments on either side suf- ficient for their political or forensic function. This side of their activities brought the Sophists into the public arena, where it is clear that they aroused strong reactions, both positive and negative. On the positive side, the long and financially highly successful careers of the most celebrated testify to a considerable demand for their services, both in satisfying the educational aspirations of the well-off, especially in Athens, then at the height of its prosperity and political and cultural influence, and in pro- viding rhetorical and forensic training for aspiring polit- icians. On the negative side, they were regarded as socially and morally subversive, especially by those of conserva- tive views. Suspicion focused both on their naturalistic outlook, especially in its application to morality and the- ology, and on their teaching of techniques of argument, which could be seen as encouraging those who acquired them, especially the young, to subvert sound morality and hallowed tradition by clever cavilling. The caricature of sophistic education given by Aristophanes in his Clouds brings the two points together; Socrates, who is presented as the representative of sophistry, first replaces the trad- itional gods by naturalistic processes such as ‘Swirl’, and then provides his pupils with arguments, including argu- ments from the non-existence of the gods, to the conclu- sion that they can welsh on their debts. Criticisms of traditional theology were not, indeed, introduced by or restricted to the Sophists. In the previous century Xeno- phanes had ridiculed anthropomorphism and maintained the existence of a single cosmic deity, and Heraclitus had castigated certain rituals as absurd and obscene, and that tradition was continued by Plato’s demand for the sup- pression of all mythical accounts of divine wrongdoings. In the fifth century we see the rise of a climate of thought which casts doubt on religion itself, either on epistemo- logical grounds, as in Protagoras’ agnostic writings, or by providing naturalistic explanations of the celestial phe- nomena traditionally regarded as divine, and of the origins of religion itself. Anaxagoras famously taught that the sun was a molten rock, while Prodicus (otherwise chiefly known for his technique of distinguishing near-synonyms, parodied in Plato’s Protagoras) is said to have maintained that the gods were either personifications of natural objects of special importance in human life, e.g. the sun, or benefactors of earlier generations deified after death. In this climate of thought, morality was no more immune from critical scrutiny than was religion. Various positions may be distinguished. Protagoras maintained (apparently inconsistently with his universal subject- ivism) a form of *moral relativism, in which moral beliefs are true for those communities in which they are main- tained. Plato’s dialogues provide evidence of more radical challenges to morality associated with Sophists. In the Republic the Sophist Thrasymachus (a historical person) argues that, since it is contrary to self-interest to accept the constraints of morality, immorality is a virtue and moral- ity a defect (*arete¯; *eudaimonia), while in the Gorgias Callicles, a pupil of Gorgias, maintains yet more radically that conventional morality is in fact a form of injustice, since it attempts to deprive the strong of their natural right to exploit the weak. It is, however, over-simplified to regard the Sophists collectively as having had a common doctrine, or even as having shared a generally sceptical or 884 Song of God radical outlook on morality. Xenophon, for instance, reports Hippias as maintaining the traditional doctrine that there exist certain natural laws, e.g. that one should worship the gods and honour one’s parents, which are common to all societies, while Protagoras, in Plato’s dia- logue of that name, holds that the educational function of the Sophist is continuous with that of the traditional edu- cational institutions of the community, namely, to impart the basic social virtues of justice and self-control. The writings of the Sophists, which were in some cases voluminous, are lost, with the sole exception of a substan- tial papyrus fragment from a work by Antiphon, critical of conventional morality on the grounds of its conflict with self-interest. The principal source of our information is Plato, who is a hostile witness, partly on the grounds that he believed the Sophists to have claimed an educational role to which they were not entitled, perhaps even more because he believed, very probably truly, that the suspi- cion which certain Sophists had attracted had contributed to the unpopularity and ultimately to the condemnation of Socrates, whose critical stance and destructive methods of argument were no doubt hard to distinguish from typ- ically Sophistic tactics. Plato is therefore at pains to depict the Sophists as bogus practitioners of philosophy, in con- trast to Socrates, the paradigm of true philosophy. The gravamen of his charge is not that they were subversive (though, as pointed out above, he does reflect that aspect), but that they pretended to knowledge that they did not possess, and that they sought popularity and success by dressing up popular prejudices with a specious appearance of novelty. At the same time his portrayal of Protagoras in the Protagoras and his detailed critique of his subjectivism in the Theaetetus show that he regarded him as a figure of major intellectual stature (his portrayals of some other Sophists are decidedly less friendly). The complexity of Plato’s attitudes should remind us of the complexity of the subject, and put us on our guard against uncritical accept- ance of an over-simplified stereotype. c.c.w.t. R. Bett, ‘The Sophists and Relativism’, Phronesis (1989). W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, iii (Cambridge, 1969). G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge, 1981). —— (ed.), The Sophists and their Legacy, Hermes Einzelschriften xliv (Wiesbaden, 1981). Sorabji, Richard Ruston Kharsedji (1934– ). Based in London and Oxford, Sorabji has written widely on all periods of ancient Greek philosophy, linking it with con- temporary issues, especially in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and ethics, and contributing substantially to the cur- rent revival of post-Aristotelian philosophy. In this last respect he has aimed to take the story beyond the Stoics and Epicureans, where it usually stops, to the end of Greek philosophy around ad 600, thereby showing its continuity with the succeeding philosophies of the Arabs, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. In particular he has used ancient writers to support the claims that causation is more closely linked to explanation than to necessitation, and that time could in principle be circular, so that any given event may lie both in the past and in the future. He is the originator and general editor of a major edition, in English translation, of the ancient commentators on Aris- totle. He is also concerned with the rationality of animals, both in ancient thinkers and in fact. a.r.l. Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation and the Continuum (London, 1983). Sorel, Georges (1847–1922). It was only after his retire- ment from working for the French government as an engin- eer that Sorel began to publish the idiosyncratic views on politics which have earned him a permanent, if minor, place in the annals of revolutionary theory. Drawn ini- tially to an ethical interpretation of Marxism and the reformist ideas of Bernstein, he became disillusioned fol- lowing the Dreyfus affair and emerged as the leading exponent of revolutionary *syndicalism. In his most famous work, Reflections on Violence (1906), Sorel argued that the main doctrines of Marxism, and in particular the general strike, should be seen as myths capable of inspir- ing the working class to violent acts of revolution that alone would be capable of effecting a fundamental trans- formation of society. Towards the end of his life Sorel became an admirer of Lenin and, to a lesser extent, of Mussolini. d.m cl. *violence, political. Isaiah Berlin, ‘Georges Sorel’, in Against the Current (Oxford, 1979). Jeremy Jennings, George Sorel: The Development and Character of his Thought (London, 1985). sorites paradox: see heap, paradox of the. sortal. A type of term, usually a noun, e.g. ‘cat’ or ‘person’, that supplies a single principle of individuating and count- ing the instances it applies to. A sortal contrasts with characterizing terms, e.g. ‘red’, with material names, e.g. ‘butter’, and with terms like ‘thing’, ‘action’, ‘place’, none of which, unless variously completed (as in ‘red chair’ ‘pat of butter’, the place we are in), supply such a principle. s.w. *individuation. P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London, 1959), esp. 168. S. Wolfram, Philosophical Logic (London, 1989), ch. 6.2.2. Sosa, Ernest (1940– ). Romeo Elton Professor of Natural Theology at Brown University, recognized for contribu- tions in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind. Sosa is best known for ‘virtue perspectivism’, an attempt to reconcile traditional ‘coherentist’ and ‘founda- tionalist’ epistemological concerns. On this view, whether a belief constitutes knowledge depends both on how it was produced and on the believer’s perspective on his own situation as knower. To be candidates for know- ledge, beliefs must be products of truth-conducive intellec- tual virtues. Elsewhere, Sosa argues that belief (de re) about a referent is a kind of propositional belief that picks out its object from the believer’s perspective, some propos- itions being ‘indexical’ and perspective-dependent. Sosa Sosa, Ernest 885 has also defended a broad Aristotelianism against the charge that it implies that one’s survival cannot matter rationally even to oneself. j.heil *metaphysics, problems of. E. Sosa, Knowledge in Perspective (Cambridge, 1991). soul. The human soul is that which gives life to the human being. For Aristotle, the soul was simply the form of the body, i.e. the way the body behaved, and thus not capable of existing separately from it; plants and animals also had souls of their own kinds. For Plato, most Christian theolo- gians of the first millennium ad, Descartes, and many others, the soul was the essential immaterial part of a human, temporarily united with its body. Aquinas also held this, while emphasizing that union with a body was the natural state for a soul. Most modern philosophers deny the exist- ence of an immaterial soul. (*Mind–body problem.) One strong argument for the existence of such a soul given in essence by Descartes is this. I am now conscious. But it is logically possible that my body should suddenly be destroyed and yet I continue to be conscious and so to exist. But a thing such as I am can only continue to exist if some part of the thing continues to exist. So I must now already have an essential non-bodily part, i.e. a soul, if my continued existence is to be logically possible. r.g.s. *pneuma; self; bundle theory of self. R. Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford, 1986). soul, world-: see world-soul. South American philosophy: see Latin American philoso- phy. sovereignty. The right, by a governing power, held against other powers, to rule a designated territory, people, and their resources—a jurisdiction—and defend these from incursion. It requires, first, criteria for according the right, and secondly, correlative duties on the part of other states. Until the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), after the Thirty Years War, the accepted sources of the right were principally religious. Post-Westphalia a secular basis for the right became established, granting sovereignty to de facto independent political entities. The corresponding duties developed to include equal treatment and respect in inter- national relations, and non-interference by other states in affairs internal to the jurisdiction, save for extreme circum- stances. Recently, ‘liberal internationalists’ have argued that justice demands that sovereignty be conditional on democratic self-governance and respect for basic rights. Thus, whilst a degree of self-determination is accepted, powers failing to uphold citizens’ basic rights and democ- racy are said to be illegitimate whatever their de facto status. Westphalia sovereignty is, on this argument, wrong, and one extreme version adds that liberal states should act on illiberal states to export rights and democracy. s.m g. *international relations, philosophy of; justice, interna- tional; State; war, just. R. Jackson (ed.), Sovereignty at the Millennium (Oxford, 2000). F. Teson, A Philosophy of International Law (Oxford, 1998). M. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York, 1977). space. We all ask where things are, how big they are, and what room there is for them or in them. Classifying these enquiries generates the concepts of extension in one or more dimensions, distance, direction, and emptiness; and discussions of these more sophisticated concepts may be grouped together as philosophizings about space. The first Greek Atomists conceived the void through which their atoms moved as having positive reality, and called it ‘the empty’ or ‘that which is not’. The latter phrase may have been intended to provoke the Eleatics, who wished to impose a veto on saying ‘That that which is not, is’. A term closer to our ‘space’ is introduced by Plato. In the Timaeus he applies ‘kho¯ra’ to a confessedly weird medium in which simple numerical ratios are represented by tiny polyhedra whose fluctuations constitute the fabric of the perceived world. To modern readers he may seem to have grasped the notion of space dominant in our think- ing. But Aristotle interprets him as proposing a (bad) the- ory of matter, drops the technical use of ‘kho¯ra’, and discusses place instead of space. Influenced, perhaps, by Plato’s Parmenides (138a–b etc.), he analyses this in terms not of distance and direction but of containment. Later Greek writers take ‘kho¯ra’ to signify a special kind of place or extension (diaste¯ma) and speak chiefly of those. Neglect of space persists through the Middle Ages. Perhaps inter- est in it goes with the belief, which Aristotle’s authority opposed, that mathematics is the paradigm for all know- ledge and illuminates the heart of reality. If reality consists of geometrical solids or, as modern physics suggests, of punctiform events fixed by four spatio-temporal co- ordinates, space is just about all there is. Anyhow it makes a joint comeback with mathematics in the seventeenth century. Newton’s description of it (Principia, definition 8, scholium) as an eternal, infinite, isotropic continuum (like air, only thinner) captivates philosophers like the Sirens’ song. He held that spatial relations are mind-independent and that objects stand in them not just to one another but to subregions of this con- tinuum. Most people wonder about the second con- tention: he wants space to be a physical reality that can neither affect other things nor be affected by them, and that sounds like a contradiction in terms. Leibniz rejected both claims about spatial relations, and Kant only the first. We conceive objects, Kant argues, as products of a per- ceiver’s imagination; what makes them non-identical is occupying non-identical chunks of space; space is unique in that there could not be two unrelated systems of spatial relations; but our idea of it is an idea, not of an individual we experience, but of how we experience other things as individuals. Philosophers still debate Kant’s and Newton’s claims, and have developed a literature of metaphysical fiction in which people visit spaces with unconventional numbers of dimensions or pass from one spatial system to another 886 Sosa, Ernest by means that defy physical laws. But they also study the conceptual demands of modern physics. Until 1900 people assumed that space and time are measurable independ- ently. According to the special theory of *relativity, if two events are distant from each other in space, their dis- tance apart in time will vary with the frame of reference we select; relatively to one frame they might be simultan- eous and relatively to another, an hour apart; and these differences in temporal separation are not independent of differences in spatial separation. It also used to be assumed that things in space satisfy Euclid’s theorems—that if three events are connected by straight lines, the triangle enclosed will be Euclidean. The general theory of relativ- ity makes the geometry of space dependent on the distrib- ution in it of matter, and thereby forces us to reconsider the status of Euclid’s theorems. w.c. *space-time. E. Abbott, Flatland (Oxford, 1926). R. Le Poidevin, Travels in Four Dimensions: The Enigmas of Space and Time (Oxford, 2003). G. Nerlich, The Shape of Space (Cambridge, 1976). Richard Sorabji, Matter, Space, Motion (Ithaca, NY, 1988). space-time. The set of all events occurring in *space and *time, like the explosion of a fire-cracker or the snapping of one’s fingers. Space-time is four-dimensional, in that each event can be located by four numbers, three for its position and one for its time of occurrence. In the space- time underlying Newtonian physics, spatial separations and temporal durations between events are independent of an observer’s state of motion. But in Einstein’s *relativ- ity theory, these measures cease to be absolute—the length of a rigid rod will be judged shorter when moving than if stationary, and similarly a moving clock runs slower. Nevertheless, there is still an absolute measure in the form of the space-time interval between events, which moved the mathematician Minkowski to remark: ‘Hence- forth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union between the two will preserve an independent reality.’ The space-time interval not only determines by how much a rod will be seen to contract, or clock run slow, but whether or not a pair of events can be causally connected, that is, whether a signal not exceeding the speed of light can be sent from the (space-time) location of one event to the other—an ‘invariant’ fact independent of one’s state of motion. r.cli. R. Geroch, General Relativity from A to B (Chicago, 1978). Spanish philosophy. Although notable Roman and medieval philosophers, such as Seneca, Averroës, Ramon Llull, and Maimonides, were born in the territories of Spain long before it appeared as a unified state in 1492, it is more appropriate to think of Spanish philosophy as the philosophy produced in Spain after its political consti- tution. As a matter of fact, 1492 is also the year of the discovery of America, and the starting-point of its domination and colonization, which turned Spain into a worldly empire. It marked as well an extraordinary flour- ishing of Spanish culture, which made the sixteenth cen- tury the Golden Age of Spanish culture. Philosophy was not alien to this flourishing. Most philosophical trends of this epoch are well represented. *Scholasticism received a strong impulse at the University of Salamanca. Vitoria, Suárez, and Molina developed a metaphysics separate from theology. Their main contri- bution, though, was their argument for a right of peoples, a ius gentium, which later became the basis for our current international law. Challenged by the problems of legit- imacy that the conquest and domination of ‘The New World’ raised, Vitoria and Suárez argued against the legit- imacy of war to impose a faith, and contended that native American peoples, as humans, had rights to property and self-government. *Humanism and *Neoplatonism were also well repre- sented at that time. The humanist J. L. Vives (1492–1540), a close friend of Erasmus, defended the importance of human subjectivity as the ground of human dignity and religious life. Moreover, during turbulent years of wars of religion in Europe, he argued in favour of peace and con- cord, as higher standards of human dignity. On the other hand, the philosopher-physician Francisco Sánchez (1550–1623), in his work That Nothing is Known, developed the humanist themes of distrusting authority and tradition as foundations of knowledge, and proposed a principle of ‘methodical doubt’ as the right way of inquiry, which was later to influence Descartes. Spanish Neoplatonism of the time finds perfect expres- sion in the Jewish writer Leo Hebraeus, whose Dialogues on Love continue the themes of Marsilio Ficino, and cul- minates in the poetry of the great Spanish *mystics, Teresa de Jesús (1515–82) and Juan de la Cruz (1542–91), whose central idea was that of love as the path to an intimate knowledge of God. The commitment of Spain to the defence of orthodox Roman Catholicism against the Reformation, and the converted Jews and Muslims, brought about a long period of persecution of free thought, exercised by the infamous and powerful Inquisition. By the beginning of the seven- teenth century, even study abroad was forbidden. It took 300 years for philosophy to become invigorated again, at the end of the nineteenth century, when it started a new period of cultural flourishing; a period that was to be dra- matically interrupted by the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). Since academic philosophy at that time was in the hands of the Church, this new philosophical movement found expression in a literary genre, the novel. Unamuno (1865–1936) is the most notable writer of this philosoph- ical bent, whose works depict characters deeply influ- enced by the sort of existential worries first formulated by Kierkegaard. But a powerful character was to appear in the next generation, Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), called to renew academic philosophy in Spain. Under German influ- ence he opted for the essay genre. His philosophy is called ratio-vitalism, a variety of Husserlian phenomenalism, Spanish philosophy 887 according to which the self is conceived not in the abstract, but in the context of the circumstances of the individual life. Accordingly, truth is perspectival. The defeat of Spanish democracy in 1939 forced into exile most of the intellectuals and scientists of the time (Ferrater-Mora can be considered the best representative of Spanish philosophy in exile). By the end of the Sixties, though, some academic philosophers played an important role in introducing current European philosophical styles and ideas, as a form of dissidence. In large part, the task was one of translation, but some names deserve mention as much for their intellectual contribution in renewing Spanish philosophy as for their ethical attitude of vindica- tion of intellectual, and political, freedom: J. M. Valverde and J. L. López Aranguren. Since the restoration of democracy, in 1978, this pluralist reception of philosoph- ical traditions has continued, but it is on the analytical side that contributions of international significance can be found. Philosophy of mind and of language, and logic, are the more active areas. a.gom. J. L. Abellán, Historia crítica del pensamiento español (Madrid, 1979–90). J. E. Corbí and J. L. Prades, Minds, Causes and Mechanisms (Oxford, 2000). M. Menéndez-Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (Madrid, 1978). Moya, C., The Philosophy of Action (Cambridge, 1990). species: see genus and species. specious present. The specious present is the finite inter- val of *time embracing experiences of which the mind is conscious as happening ‘now’, and constitutes the bound- ary between the remembered past and the anticipated future. That it exceeds a mere instant is demonstrated by our capacity to perceive continuous movement. Although the concept of the specious present is subjective, ‘dynamic’ theories of time regard it as having an objective counterpart. e.j.l. R. M. Gale (ed.), The Philosophy of Time (New York, 1967). speech-acts: see linguistic acts. Spencer, Herbert (1820–1903). English evolutionist, father of sociology, and self-appointed philosopher, Spencer enjoyed immense popularity in his own time, especially in America. His huge output, the ‘Synthetic Phil- osophy’, was made possible by the fact that he troubled himself little with the writings of others, claiming indeed that the reading of books with which he disagreed gave him headaches. Sinking in esteem by the century’s end to hitherto unfathomed depths, Spencer is today remem- bered primarily as the enthusiast for extreme laissez-faire or *Social Darwinism, and the classic exemplar of the *nat- uralistic fallacy as he attempted to derive the force of morality from the fact and course of *evolution. In his day, however, he was far more popular as the prophet of progress, claiming that nature tends always towards equi- librium and that this sparks an upward evolutionary move from homogeneity to heterogeneity. One suspects that, even to this day, the unsung figure of Spencer rides on, paradoxically among both right-wing politicians decrying the dangers of state interference and left-wing ecologists hymning the virtues of balance. m.r. R. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago, 1987). H. Spencer, First Principles (London, 1862). Speusippus (c.410–337bc). An Athenian philosopher who was Plato’s nephew and successor as head of the *Acad- emy. He wrote extensively on topics in metaphysics, the philosophy of logic and language, philosophy of nature, and ethics; but his thoughts have reached us only in tantal- izingly incomplete and obscure form. There is some evi- dence for attributing to him a nominalist, anti-essentialist tendency in his theorizing on semantics, mathematics, and natural kinds. Thus he is reported by Aristotle as deny- ing independent, substantive existence to numbers, and as maintaining that things should be defined not by their own intrinsic characters but rather in terms of their rela- tions of similarity and dissimilarity to other things. If more were known about these ideas, it might illuminate many aspects of Aristotle’s theorizing about essence. j.d.g.e. Speusippus’ writings have been collected and discussed by P. Lang, De Speusippi Academici Fragmenta (Bonn, 1911) and more recently by L. Tarán, Speusippus of Athens (Leiden, 1981). Spinoza, Baruch (or Benedictus) (1632–77). Dutch Jewish philosopher. Spinoza’s family were Portuguese Judaizing Marranos (forced converts to Christianity living secretly as Jews). His father had emigrated to Amsterdam to avoid persecution, where he built up a successful merchant busi- ness. Spinoza’s mother died when he was 6 and his father when he was 22. Spinoza continued for a time as a respected member of his synagogue, running the family business with his brother. However, a crisis arose when he would not renounce the heterodox opinions he had been heard to voice, and, after unsuccessful efforts to buy his silence, he was cursed and excommunicated from the Jew- ish community. Opinions differ over why such strong action was taken against him. One view is that the peculiar religious position of the Marranos had encouraged scepti- cism and laxity in Jewish practice and that the rabbis felt that they must affirm the religious unity of their commu- nity (there were some other similar instances of herem). Others emphasize the need to reassure the city fathers that the Jewish community was committed to the same basic theism as Christianity. A few years after the ban Spinoza (with the family busi- ness wound up) left Amsterdam and lived for some years in Rijnsburg, near Leiden, lodging with a member of the Collegiant sect, with which he was developing an associ- ation. After four years he moved to Voorburg and then to The Hague, living in modest lodgings. (The houses at Rijnsburg and The Hague now contain the library and offices of the Dutch Spinoza society, the Vereniging het 888 Spanish philosophy Spinozahuis.) He was a skilled optical lens grinder and some of his income came from this, though he also accepted some small financial support from his followers. He acquired international fame, and, with the publication of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in 1670, notoriety. Among his friends and frequent correspondents was Henry Oldenburg, Secretary of the Royal Society in Lon- don. Oldenburg and some other Christians may have hoped that Spinoza would lead that mass conversion of the Jews to Christianity which their millenarian beliefs led them to expect. However, Spinoza conceived Jesus as at most the last of the great Jewish prophets. Spinoza only published two books in his lifetime: The Principles of Descartes’s Philosophy (written initially for a young man he was informally tutoring, published 1663) and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. The latter was pub- lished anonymously at Amsterdam, though for reasons of prudence with a falsely titled frontispiece and binding. It soon became explosively infamous and Spinoza, once he became known as the author, much reviled for it. It is part biblical study, part political treatise. Its over- riding goal is to recommend full freedom of thought and religious practice, subject to behavioural conformity with the laws of the land. As virtually the first examination of the Scriptures (primarily the Pentateuch) as historical docu- ments, reflecting the intellectual limitations of their time, and of problematic authorship, it opened the so-called higher criticism. What is important, claims Spinoza, is the Bible’s moral message; its implied science and metaphysics can stand only as imaginative adjuncts for teaching ethics to the multitude. Though Spinoza unobtrusively identifies *God and *nature, one of the opinions leading to his excommunication (as he was already doing in his work in progress on the Ethics), he writes in a seemingly more orthodox vein, even while denying the genuinely supernatural character of reported miracles. It is much debated whether this shows that those who now read the Ethics in too secular a way are misun- derstanding it, or whether Spinoza was adapting his pre- sentation not indeed to the masses, but to conventionally religious intellectuals of his time, among whom he wished to promote tolerant liberal ideals. The study of the Bible is designed to show that there is nothing in it which should sanction intolerance within Judaism or Christianity, or between them, and to illustrate certain political facts by reflections on Jewish history, such as the desirable rela- tions between Church and State. Spinoza’s political the- ory owes a good deal to Hobbes, utilizing similarly the idea of a *social contract, but deriving a more liberal and democratic lesson from it. Spinoza was personally com- mitted to the republican policies of the De Witt brothers in Amsterdam, was outraged at their murder, and was against the royalist ambitions of the House of Orange. Shortly after his death Opera Postuma was published by his friends, containing the Ethics, one of the major and most influential works of Western philosophy, the unfin- ished Tractatus Politicus, some lesser works, and some important correspondence. So notorious had Spinoza’s opinions become that they still only gave the name of the author as B.D.S. (Two other works have come to light since.) Spinoza has been more variously interpreted than most philosophers. Perhaps this only shows his system’s resem- blance to the universe it mirrors. A less contentious explan- ation is that, depending on the reader’s starting-point, it may come either as a call to abandon traditional Jewish or Christian religious belief and practice, or as a revitalization of the conception of a God who seemed to be dying. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries he was widely regarded with horror as a scarcely covert atheist, in the nineteenth as a precursor of absolute *idealism. Some twentieth-century thinkers interpreted him, rather one- sidedly, as a precursor of a *‘cognitive science’ interpret- ation of mind, others almost as a logical atomist, while others again hailed his *pantheism as providing a meta- physical foundation for ‘deep ecology’. Among the many very different thinkers who have either regarded them- selves as, in a broad sense, Spinozists, or as strongly influ- enced by him, are Goethe, Lessing, Heine, Nietzsche, George Eliot, Einstein, Freud, Bertrand Russell, and George Santayana, while Hegel saw Spinoza’s philosophy as a particularly important dialectical stage on the road to his own absolute idea. Historically, Spinoza was strongly influenced by Descartes, though the upshot of his thought is markedly different, and, to a debatable degree, by vari- ous Jewish thinkers. Spinoza’s great work, the Ethics, is presented as a deduct- ive system in the manner of Euclid. Each of its five parts (‘Concerning God’; ‘On the Nature and Origin of the Mind’; ‘Concerning the Origin and Nature of the Emo- tions’; ‘Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emo- tions’; ‘Of the Power of the Intellect, or of Human Freedom’) opens with a set of definitions and axioms and is followed by a series of theorems proved upon the basis of what precedes them, with more informal remarks in scholia and appendices. In part 1 Spinoza proves (understand henceforth: or intends to prove) that there is only one substance (in the sense of genuinely individual thing with an intelligibility not derivative from that of other things), and this answers both to the traditional meanings of ‘God’ (for example, its existence follows from its essence) and of ‘nature’ (that of which the laws of nature are the operations). (Thus God did not create but is nature.) Spinoza derives this claim by pushing the traditional notion of an individual substance to its limit in a complex argument roughly as follows. 1. First we must note some of his opening definitions: ‘By *substance I understand what is in itself and is con- ceived through itself, i.e. that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed.’ ‘By *attribute I understand what the intellect perceives of a substance, as constituting its essence.’ ‘By *mode I understand the affections of a substance or that which is in another thing through which it is also con- ceived.’ ‘By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, Spinoza, Baruch 889 . aimed to take the story beyond the Stoics and Epicureans, where it usually stops, to the end of Greek philosophy around ad 600, thereby showing its continuity with the succeeding philosophies of the. commu- nity (there were some other similar instances of herem). Others emphasize the need to reassure the city fathers that the Jewish community was committed to the same basic theism as Christianity. A. of Plato. Socrates is one of the most significant yet most enig- matic figures in the history of philosophy: significant because his relation to Plato was crucial to the develop- ment of the latter,