*‘naturalism’. His active as well as scholarly engagement with politics is evident in his life and writings. Most recently, he has produced a major volume on modernity (Sources of the Self), in which the self is conceived as consti- tuted by a relation to the good; an essay on ‘multicultural- ism’; and The Ethics of Authenticity, readily accessible but also of scholarly interest. e.t.s. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). ——The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). Taylor, Richard (1919–2003). Taylor, an American philosopher who held professorships at Brown and Columbia, was among those who saw common sense as the basis for reasoning. He was particularly known for his well-written prose, shrewd dialectics, iconoclasm and, especially in his later writings, advocacy of *wisdom over mere learnedness. Among his main works are Action and Purpose (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966), Metaphysics (4th edn., Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1992), Good and Evil (Buffalo, NY, 1970), and With Heart and Mind (New York, 1973). To illustrate Taylor’s approach, common-sense yields that it is up to us what we do and that every event is caused. These apparently conflicting claims are reconciled by saying that a person is an agent, a substantial self, and not a bundle of events (as Hume thought); and agency is outside the scope of the claim that all events are caused. This approach to the conundrum of *free will, however, faces serious challenges in specifying the nature of an agent and in explaining how an agent can be influenced by external events without being caused to act. m.b. P. van Inwagen (ed.), Time and Cause: Essays Presented to Richard Taylor (Dordrecht, 1980). te : see Confucianism. teaching and indoctrinating. Indoctrination is the teach- ing of what is known to be false as true, or more widely the teaching of what is believed true in such a way as to pre- clude critical inquiry on the part of learners. Teachers are thus in a strong position to indoctrinate, as their pupils are usually in no position to judge the truth or reasonableness of what they are being taught. While in the Republic Plato advised the guardians to teach the people a *‘noble lie’ to get them to accept their station in life, few teachers actually teach things they believe untrue or unfounded. Although non-believers often accuse Catholic teachers of indoctrinating because they teach Catholic dogma as true, they are not guilty of Platonic insincerity. They might, though, be teaching in such a way as to preclude inquiry on the part of pupils. To avoid indoctrinating, teachers must ensure that at some stage in a course of study pupils will hear competing points of view on disputed questions. Judgement, though, will still be required as to just which questions are really disputed, which points of view are worth considering, and when young pupils are ready to consider alternatives without becoming utterly confused. a.o’h. I. A. Snook (ed.), Concepts of Indoctrination (London, 1972). teaching philosophy. Teachers teach two things: what the results of inquiry are, and how to get more of them. Teachers of *philosophy want to find and pass on philo- sophical truths and, more importantly, the knack of both getting them and distinguishing them from competitors such as nonsense and falsehood. Two near-paradoxes result. Philosophical results are important, and philosophers typically have firm and, they hope, well-thought-out views on philosophical issues. But they want students to acquire the ability to form justified beliefs for themselves, even if the cost is occasionally going astray. So good philosophers typically do not mind students rejecting their beliefs; indeed they positively welcome it, as long as the disagreement is well supported. As all good teachers know, this feature of the pedagogical process makes cer- tain students very nervous. Actually, as all good students know, it also makes certain teachers very nervous. The second semi-paradox concerns the tension between what is taught and the way it is taught. Philoso- phers emphasize *rational persuasion, rational discourse, and rational examination. As Robert Boyle said, ‘Philoso- phy, when it deserves that name, is but Reason, improv’d by Study, Learning, and the use of things.’ However, the way in which the importance of rational persuasion is instilled may have very little to do with rational persua- sion. Humour, irony, analogy, intonation, sentence struc- ture, allusion, arguments ad hominem and from authority, the perceived enthusiasm and confidence of the speaker, the amount of self-motivation required of the student, and a host of other factors, including even the very order in which opposing views are presented, all affect the likeli- hood of students’ accepting or even comprehending the points presented. Even intellectually extraneous factors such as the room’s light or the presence of moving air affect uptake and acceptance. Preaching the primacy of reason involves a host of non-rational methods. Plato believed that philosophy could only be taught soul to soul, and encounters in small groups provide the best way to convey both the excitement involved in, and the abilities required for, the practice of philosophy. In such settings, the student can try out ideas en route to truth which will then be subjected to detailed constructive scrutiny by herself, her teachers, and her peers. However, the realities of teaching often make this wildly utopian. It is difficult for soul to speak to soul when the souls are clustered in groups of up to 300. What one politician has called ‘negative increases’ in educational funding, and the consequent deterioration in the educa- tional process, ensure that the Platonic ideal is seldom realized before the graduate stage. (Detailed discussions concerning real-world teaching are offered quarterly in Teaching Philosophy. Also of interest is Thinking, a journal concerned with philosophy for children.) Plato also believed that students need a rigorous educa- tional background for philosophy: something contempor- ary educational systems find difficulty in providing. Many first-year university students do not know so much 910 Taylor, Charles as the names of Archimedes or Newton. However, such gaps can be filled, and many universities offer general introductory courses to attempt just that. More perni- cious is the deliberate inculcation of irrationality. Unsure of how to cope with multiculturalism, many teachers and too many academics retreat into the relativism they con- fuse with tolerance. Schools now turn out a host of con- temporary Averroists, prepared to say straightfacedly, ‘Well, it’s true for you, but not for me.’ Thus, in addition to the more or less standard familially inspired religious, political, and moral prejudices, contemporary education adds another, moral and epistemological relativism, impressed in the schools, and reinforced by a number of non-philosophical disciplines, which the working philoso- pher is called upon to remove before the real business of education can begin. j.j.m. *teaching and indoctrinating; American philosophy. H. P. Grice, ‘Reply to Richards’, in Richard E. Grandy and Richard Warner (eds.), Philosophical Grounds of Rationality (Oxford, 1986). David Stove, The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies (Oxford, 1991). technology: see Frankfurt School. teleological argument for the existence of God. A world-based line of argument appealing to special fea- tures, those aspects of the world which appear to be designed and purposive, analogous to cases of human design. It is usually put probabilistically, arguing that the most plausible explanation is that of a world designer and creator, with intelligence, purposes, etc. The theory of *evolution, suggesting an alternative explanation for some kinds of order, has sapped some of the persuasiveness of older versions, and has incited the formulation of more broadly based versions of this argument, such as those of F. R. Tennant and Richard Swinburne. g.i.m. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1777). Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford, 1979). F. R. Tennant, Philosophical Theology (Cambridge, 1968). teleological explanation. From the Greek word for goal, task, completion, or perfection. Teleological explanations attempt to account for things and features by appeal to their contribution to optimal states, or the normal func- tioning, or the attainment of goals, of wholes or systems they belong to. Socrates’ story (in Plato’s Phaedo) of how he wanted to understand things in terms of what is best is an early discussion of teleology. Another is Aristotle’s dis- cussion of ‘final cause’ explanations in terms of that for the sake of which something is, acts, or is acted upon. Such explanations are parodied in Voltaire’s Candide. There are many cases in which an item’s contribution to a desirable result does not explain its occurrence. For example, what spring rain does for crops does not explain why it rains in the spring. But suppose we discovered that some object’s features were designed and maintained by an intelligent creator to enable it to accomplish some pur- pose. Then an understanding of a feature’s contribution to that purpose could help us explain its presence without mistakenly assuming that everything is as it is because of the effects it causes. There are many things (e.g. well- designed clocks in good working order) known to have been produced by intelligent manufacturers for well- understood purposes, whose features can, therefore, be explained in this way. But if all teleological explanation presupposes intelligent design, only creationists could accept teleological explanations of natural things, and only conspiracy theorists could accept teleological explan- ations of economic and social phenomena. Teleological explanations which do not presuppose that what is to be explained is the work of an intelligent agent are to be found in biology, economics, and else- where. Their justification typically involves two compon- ents: an analysis of the function of the item to be explained and an aetiological account. Functional analysis seeks to determine what contribu- tion the item to be explained makes to some main activity, to the proper functioning, or to the well-being or preser- vation, of the organism, object, or system it belongs to. For example, given what is known about the contribution of normal blood circulation to the main activities and the well-being of animals with hearts, the structure and behaviour of the heart lead physiologists to identify its function with its contribution to circulation. Given the function of part of an organism, the function of a subpart (e.g. some nerve-ending in the heart) can be identified with its contribution—if any—to the function of the part (e.g. stimulating heart contractions). Important empirical problems in biology and the *social sciences and equally important conceptual problems in the philosophy of sci- ence arise from questions about the evaluation of ascrip- tions of purposes and functions. Functional analysis cannot explain a feature’s presence without an aetiological account which explains how the feature came to be where we find it. In natural-selection explanations, aetiological accounts typically appeal to (a) genetic transmission mechanisms by which features are passed from one generation to the next and (b) selection mechanisms (e.g. environmental pressures) because of which organisms with the feature to be explained have a better chance to reproduce than organisms which lack it. The justification of teleological explanations in socio- biology, anthropology, economics, and elsewhere typi- cally assumes the possibility of finding accounts of trans- mission and selection mechanisms roughly analogous to (a) and (b). j.b.b. *causality; biology, philosophical problems of; Nagel, Ernest. A. Ariew, R. Cummins, and M. Perlman (eds.), Functions (Oxford, 2002). Morton O. Beckner, Biological Ways of Thought (Berkeley, Calif., 1968), chs. 6–8. Larry Wright, ‘Functions’, Christopher Bourse, ‘Wright on Func- tions’, Robert Cummins, ‘Functional Analysis’ (along with teleological explanation 911 further references to standard literature), in Elliott Sober (ed.), Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). teleology: see teleological explanation; Aristotle; causal- ity; biology, philosophical problems of; Nagel, Ernest. temperance: see self-control. temporal properties and relations: see A-series and B-series. tender- and tough-minded. ‘The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human tempera- ments’, said William James in Pragmatism (1907), listing typifying characteristics of each as below. An almost per- fect example of the second is A. J. Ayer; pure forms of the first are scarcer. The tender-minded The tough-minded Rationalistic Empiricist (going by ‘principles’) (going by ‘facts’) Intellectualistic Sensationalistic Idealistic Materialistic Optimistic Pessimistic Religious Irreligious Free-willist Fatalistic Monistic Pluralistic Dogmatical Sceptical t.l.s.s. T. L. S. Sprigge, ‘A. J. Ayer: An Appreciation of his Philosophy’, Utilitas (1990). tense. Grammatically, tense is a feature of verbs, exempli- fied by the past, present, and future forms ‘he went’, ‘he is going’, and ‘he will go’. Philosophers think of tense in broader terms, to include any kind of temporal expression whose reference is dependent on its time of utterance, such as ‘yesterday’, ‘now’, or ‘next week’. Thus, ‘yester- day’ refers to the day before the one on which it is uttered. The truth-values of tensed sentences can change over time: on one day it may be true to say ‘Yesterday it rained’, while on the next day it may be false to say this. Adherents of tensed theories of *time hold that tensed sentences are made true by tensed *facts, and that facts change as time passes, whereas adherents of tenseless theories of time hold that tensed sentences are made true by unchanging, tenseless facts. For the tenseless theorist, tense is merely a feature of our language or thought about the world, not a feature of temporal reality itself. e.j.l. D. H. Mellor, Real Time, 2nd edn. (London, 1998). term. A word or phrase denoting an individual or class, or the propositional component it expresses. Thus ‘John is a man’ contains two terms, ‘John’ and ‘man’ (or ‘is a man’), denoting John and the set of men respectively. More gen- erally, any word or phrase that determines the proposition expressed. In this sense, the above sentence contains the *syncategorematic term ‘is’, which does not denote an individual or class. w.a.d. H. W. B. Joseph, An Introduction to Logic (Oxford, 1916), ch. 2. terrorism. ‘Terrorism’ is a highly emotive, pejorative label, originally applied to the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution, but now most commonly used of *political violence as employed by insurgents against a *state, unless specifically qualified as ‘state terrorism’. Its definition has proved philosophically elusive, depending, as it does, on whether, and, if so, how, the pejorative force is to be captured definitionally; or, in other words, on whether terrorism is to be viewed as ipso facto unjustifi- able, and, if so, why, which evidently raises substantive philosophical issues. Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to charac- terizing terrorism in a way that views it as, ceteris paribus, morally wrong. One regards it as not just any tactic which induces terror by the use of violence, for such terror is rou- tinely employed in wartime by the use of military force, which is not thereby terroristic. Rather, it is the use of force of a military character in contravention of the rules of war as adumbrated in the theory of the just *war. Thus, on the one hand, terrorism may be seen as the use of such force without a *jus ad bellum because its perpetrators—as non-state actors—lack proper authority. To this criticism those dubbed terrorists typically reply that the states they oppose have forfeited authority over them by their unjust behaviour, which furnishes them with a just cause (an argument advanced by John Locke). It is this line of thought that commonly leads so-called terrorists to view themselves as ‘freedom fighters’. On the other hand, however, what may be attributed to terrorists is a failure of *jus in bello, resulting from breaches of the principle of non-combatant immunity by the target- ing of civilians. One response to this charge (adopted by Sartre in his defence of FLN violence in Algeria) is that the civilians targeted are not innocent of the injustices combated. Another is that the exposure of civilians to injury through terrorism is no greater, and perhaps less, than that routinely accepted in conventional wars. The major drawback of this unjust war model of terror- ism is that, in regarding terrorism as prima facie wrong because contrary to the rules of war, it concedes that ter- rorism is indeed a form of war; albeit often one in which terrorist tactics are employed precisely because the resources for a conventional war are lacking, and there- fore, since military victory is impossible, success can be achieved only by terrorizing a people and its government into submitting to demands. Yet, though terrorists usually claim to be fighting a war, this is exactly what govern- ments are loath to allow, since this would give terrorists the same protections as soldiers against the operation of the ordinary criminal law. A second approach to terrorism is, therefore, to view it as wrong for the same sort of reason as any violent crime is wrong, and distinguished from other such crimes only by having a political motive. The usual anti-terrorist strategy is thus to employ a criminal justice rather than a military approach, though this can prove problematic in the case of international terrorists operating from beyond the attacked state’s jurisdiction. So-called terrorists will deny that their 912 teleological explanation violence is morally wrong just because contrary to the laws of a possibly unjust government, however, and will go on to repudiate the pejorative label. It may still be applied to them, Michael Walzer argues, if they contravene a ‘polit- ical code’ of anti-state violence by targeting civilians rather than, on this account, only politicians and the like. These definitional problems may, perhaps, be over- come by using the word ‘terrorism’ without pejorative force and viewing it as a species of political violence not accorded the legitimacy of war. Then the substantive question comes to the fore of when such violence (includ- ing the violence of the state) is justified. p.g. *political violence; war, just. P. Gilbert, New Terror, New Wars (Edinburgh, 2003). —— Terrorism, Security and Nationality (London, 1994). T. Honderich, After the Terror (Edinburgh, 2003). M. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York, 1992). M. Warner and R. Crisp (eds.), Terrorism, Protest and Power (Alder- shot, 1990). B. T. Wilkins, Terrorism and Collective Responsibility (London, 1992). tertium non datur : see excluded middle, law of. testimony. The role of testimony in getting and spreading reliable belief or *knowledge has been a relatively neglected epistemological issue. Traditional epistemol- ogy has had a marked individualist flavour in its stress upon the status and vindication of information gleaned from individual perception, memory, or inference. But it is clear that most of what any given individual knows comes from others: palpably with knowledge of history, geography, or science, more subtly with knowledge about everyday facts such as when one was born. Recently, more attention has been paid to this topic, and amongst the problems discussed are the scope of the dependency each of us has on the word of others, the difficulty of valid- ating the dependency via inferences from an individual’s experience of witness reliability, and the problems of expert evidence. c.a.j.c. C. A. J. Coady, Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford, 1992). test of time. For a work or idea of any sort to evoke admir- ation or agreement over many generations implies that it transcends fashion and can be appreciated from different standpoints. In the aesthetic realm, where what is at issue is particular objects for which there can be no universally applicable standard of taste, the test of time may be the best, if not the only, determinant of ultimate quality. In politics, too, where knowledge of the effects of institu- tions and policies may be hard to gauge directly, the test of time becomes a strong criterion of value, particularly for *conservative thinkers. a.o’h. *tradition. A. Savile, The Test of Time (Oxford, 1982). Thales of Miletus (6th century bc). By tradition he was the first philosopher and the founder of the Ionian School. According to Herodotus, Thales predicted (within a year) the solar eclipse of 585 bc. Aristotle attributes to him the conjecture that (1) water is the material principle of all things and that (2) a soul (*psyche) is a sort of ‘motor’ (kine¯tikon), for he said that a magnet has a soul because it moves iron. g.b.m. G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philoso- phers, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1990). theism: see God. theodicy. A justifying explanation of why God permits *evil, responding to the problem of evil. The theodicist puts forward what he or she takes to be the actual pur- poses, rationales, etc. that explain and justify the divine actions, and inactions, with respect to evil. It contrasts with a defence, which has a more modest project, that of refuting atheistic arguments from evil without commit- ting to a positive claim about the divine reasons. John Hick, for example, proposes a theodicy, while Alvin Plantinga formulates a defence. The idea of human *free will often appears in a both of these strategies, but in dif- ferent ways. John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London, 1968). Alvin Plantinga, God and Other Minds (Ithaca, NY, 1967). theology and philosophy. That the two have important overlapping concerns seems beyond question. A system- atic philosophy that fails to give any thought to the ques- tion of *God’s existence could be judged seriously incomplete: likewise a theology that fails to enter into dis- cussion with opposed views of the world, or to explore whatever philosophical support is available for its princi- pal claims. Other and related topics that have clearly both philo- sophical and theological relevance include questions, for example, of personal identity—in relation to life beyond the death of the body, metaphysical questions about time and eternity (God’s relation to time), and moral questions about the Christian doctrine of *Atonement. Theologians sometimes claim that philosophical appraisal has no legitimacy in relation to what they see as a ‘revealed’ system of belief. But surely this cannot be right. First: to preface a statement of doctrine with such words as ‘It is divinely revealed that . . . ’cannot confer coherence on what is logically incoherent or make a con- tradiction come out as true. There is therefore legitimate work for logic and philosophy of language in the analysis of such doctrinal claims. Second: however much of his religious beliefs a theologian regards as revealed, that can- not constitute a complete theistic system. The revealed totality has to be intelligibly related to the deity who allegedly revealed it, imparted it to mankind; and its authority needs to be more convincingly established than that of rival claimants. What is taken to be the essential nature of that deity, qua revealer, cannot itself be derived from revelation. It is a proper topic for philosophical (metaphysical) inquiry. A philosophical component—an theology and philosophy 913 epistemology of belief—is thus vitally necessary to a revealed theology. There is, of course, one route of escape from that model of ‘revealed package plus metaphysical account of its divine origin’: namely, to see the ‘revealed’ package as a set of ‘pictures’, stories, parables, by which to regulate human life, and for which no further grounding is possible or appropriate. The religious authority and the efficacy of these pictures, however, when taken in that way, become enigmatic—and questionable. r.w.h. *God and the philosophers; religion, history of the phil- osophy of; Bonhoeffer. C. F. Delaney, Rationality and Religious Belief (Notre Dame, Ind., 1979). J. C. A. Gaskin, The Quest for Eternity (1984), esp. ch. 1. R. W. Hepburn, ‘The Philosophy of Religion’, in G. H. R. Parkin- son (ed.), An Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (London, 1988). John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven, Conn., 1989). Richard Swinburne, Faith and Reason (Oxford, 1981). Theophrastus (c.371–c.287 bc). Younger colleague of Aristotle, his partner in his researches and his successor as head of the Lyceum, the school Aristotle founded. Theophrastus wrote on everything from *modal logic (where he introduced the rule that the conclusion cannot be stronger than the weakest premiss) to penalties for gazumping. His surviving writings include sketches of (faulty) human character-types, fundamental works on botany, and shorter pieces, including a Metaphysics which contains more questions than solutions. He has been seen as rejecting Aristotelian positions for increased *mech- anism and *materialism; but the differences can be exag- gerated, and he is best regarded not as deliberately rejecting Aristotelian positions but as continuing Aris- totle’s own procedure of questioning and criticism, influ- enced by his own preferences and inclinations. r.w.s. W. W. Fortenbaugh et al. (eds.), Rutgers University Studies in Clas- sical Humanities, ii, iii, v, vii (New Brunswick, NJ, 1985, 1988, 1992, 1995). theorem. In an *axiomatic system a theorem is the last of a sequence of formulae or propositions each of which is an axiom or follows from preceding steps in accordance with specified rules. Such a sequence is a proof or a derivation. A proof is clearly formal where the entire process is syn- tactical and can be employed without further attention to meanings, as in a computer computation. In some formal systems of logic using *natural deduc- tion, theorems of logic can be generated without recourse to axioms. In such cases a theorem of logic is one which is derivable from the empty set of premisses. r.b.m. B. Mates, Elementary Logic (Oxford, 1972). theory. A scientific theory is an attempt to bind together in a systematic fashion the knowledge that one has of some particular aspect of the world of experience. The aim is to achieve some form of understanding, where this is usually cashed out as explanatory power and predictive fertility. The traditional analysis, going back to the Greeks and most recently championed by such logical empiricists as Carl Hempel and Ernest Nagel, sees theories as ‘hypo- thetico-deductive systems’, meaning that one has sets of laws bound together through the fact that, from a few high-powered axioms or hypotheses, everything else can be shown to follow as a deductive consequence. Explan- ation therefore is a matter of showing how things hap- pened because of the laws of the theory. Prediction is a matter of showing how things will happen in accordance with the laws of the theory. Most significant is the fact that really successful theories bind together information from many hitherto disparate areas of experience, thus exhibit- ing what the philosopher William Whewell characterized as a *‘consilience of inductions’. In recent years, this picture of theories has come under some considerable attack. Although it may apply fairly well to such a theory as Newton’s theory of gravitational attraction, something like Darwin’s theory of *evolution through natural selection seems not to be as tightly inte- grated (deductively) as is supposed. Moreover, while such a theory as Darwin’s certainly has some predictive power, it can hardly be said that this is a compelling attraction. Hence, rather than relying on the traditional excuses (‘biology is immature’ and so forth), an increasing number of thinkers have started to promote a view of theories which (they claim) pays far greater attention to the actual practice of science. Supporters of this ‘semantic view’ of theories argue that theories should not be seen as overall systems trying to cover, at one move, major areas of experience. Rather, more informally, they should be con- sidered as sets of theoretical *models which are given empirical meaning only inasmuch as they can be applied directly (semantically) to certain limited areas of empirical reality. The virtues of the theory (like explanation and pre- diction) are not prescribed beforehand, but are very much a function of the particular model in use at the time. Debate continues, but undoubtedly at least part of the divide is between an older philosophy of science which sees the task to be that of prescription of the ideal form of science, and a newer philosophy of science which rests content with a description of the way in which science is actually performed. m.r. *observation and theory. R. B. Braithwaite, Scientific Explanation (Cambridge, 1953). R. Giere, Explaining Science (Chicago, 1988). theory-ladenness. The idea that all observations are interpreted through the medium of theories. The position has three versions. The first insists that when observations are described, the description inescapably involves some theoretical perspective. Thus, observations will report the ant species Solenopsis invicta engaged in foraging rather than as red objects moving along linear paths. More dra- matic is the claim that what is sensed is affected by one’s theory—that our conceptual frameworks affect the sen- sory inputs. With the appropriate knowledge base, we see 914 theology and philosophy the Old Bailey as a criminal court rather than as a building inhabited by oddly garbed humans engaged in hectoring and wheedling. A contemporary version of theory- ladenness asserts that ‘observations’ are constructed— one counts certain observations as being of psi particles rather than as blips on a cathode-ray tube because there is general agreement in the relevant social community on the former interpretation. Theory-ladenness has been widely used as a reason to question the objectivity of observational data. p.h. Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening (Cambridge, 1983), ch. 10. theory theory of mind. Humans have a natural ability to attribute mental states to one another in order to explain and predict behaviour. This common-sense psychological reasoning enables us to make sense of what others do and say. To the extent that this reasoning consists in a body of knowledge about the workings of people’s minds and their connection with their acts and utterances, we can call such reasoning a theory; although the term ‘theory of mind’ is often used just to refer to the ability to attribute mental states to others. To explain this ability, many philosophers and psychologists have supposed that humans are equipped, perhaps innately, with a theory of mind which they deploy to makes sense of others as rational agents. Such a theory is not consciously or explicitly known, but it is said to be tacitly known. This is the theory theory of mind. The rival view of how we attribute mental states to others is *simulation theory. According to this view, we work out what others think and feel, or might do and say, by using ourselves to simulate their predicament and discovering what we would think or feel, do or say, were we in their predicament, subject to the same factors. Simulation theory privileges the first-person point of view in our understanding of others, whereas ‘theory’ theory privileges the third-personal observation of others. b.c.s. M. Davies and T. Stone, Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate (Oxford, 1995). theosophy. In a broad sense, theosophy is the mystical doctrine of various German thinkers of the later *Renais- sance period, most notably Jakob Boehme. It holds that man can have knowledge of God only by some kind of mystical acquaintance. More narrowly, and comically, it is the name of a movement led by Madame Blavatsky and Mrs Annie Besant in the late nineteenth century which sought to bring enlightenment to the Western world from Eastern religion and metaphysics. a.q. thing-in-itself. This is Kant’s expression for the object con- sidered as it is independently of its cognitive relation to the human mind. It is contrasted with the object as it appears, or phenomenon, which is the object qua given to the mind in accordance with its sensible forms. Although Kant denies that we can know the thing-in-itself, he maintains that we must think of it as the ground of appearance. h.e.a. *phenomena and noumena. H. E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven, Conn., 1983). things. ‘Thing’, in its most general sense, is interchange- able with ‘entity’ or *‘being’ and is applicable to any item whose *existence is acknowledged by a system of ontol- ogy, whether that item be particular, universal, abstract, or concrete. In this sense, not only material bodies but also properties, relations, events, numbers, sets, and propos- itions are—if they are acknowledged as existing—to be accounted ‘things’. In this sense, then, the statement ‘Everything is a thing’ amounts to an analytic triviality. However, it is more common for philosophers to use ‘thing’ in a more restricted sense, in which it is interchange- able with ‘object’ and stands in opposition to such terms as *‘property’, *‘relation’, and *‘event’. In the restricted sense, things are items which possess properties, stand in relations to one another, and undergo the changes which constitute events. Thus understood, the notion of a thing is closely linked to the traditional notion of a *‘substance’. As such, it is a notion also linked to the grammatical and logical notion of a *subject (as opposed to a predicate). Indeed, Frege’s well-known distinction between ‘objects’ and ‘concepts’ precisely mirrors the subject–predicate distinction (at least as it is employed in logic). What, then, is the hallmark of thinghood in this restricted sense? Two competing answers to this question dominate current debate. One, the linguistic answer, espoused by Frege but also by more recent philosophers such as Quine, holds that an object is whatever may be referred to by a proper *name or can be made the value of a variable of quantification. But a problem with this answer is to specify without circularity what constitutes a genuine proper name (or, more generally, a genuine sin- gular term) or variable of quantification. For instance, when a soldier is described as having died for the sake of his country, should the noun phrase ‘the sake of his coun- try’ be regarded as genuine singular term naming some object or thing? Surely not: but it is arguably only because we already believe, on independent grounds, that there are no such things as ‘sakes’ that we refuse to regard this noun phrase as a genuine singular term. Here an adherent of the linguistic answer may follow the lead of Frege and Quine by insisting that the application of genuine names or variables of quantification demands the provision of cri- teria of identity for the things named or quantified over: in Quine’s words, ‘No entity without identity’. But this sug- gests that in fact metaphysical rather than linguistic con- siderations lie at the root of our concept of thinghood, and more particularly that the hallmark of thinghood consists in the possession of determinate and objective identity conditions. This is the contention of the alternative, meta- physical answer to the question ‘What is a thing?’ By this account, a thing is any item falling under a sortal concept supplying a criterion of identity for its instances. Thus shoes and ships and sealing-wax are things, but certainly not sakes and probably not propositions. things 915 There is a special sense of the term ‘thing’ or ‘object’ in which it is used to draw a contrast with the term ‘subject’, in the sense of the latter in which it is used to denote a sub- ject of consciousness or experience, that is, a person or *self. Of course, in a broader sense subjects or persons are themselves ‘things’, and indeed apparently things with determinate identity conditions, however difficult it may be to specify those conditions satisfactorily. What chiefly motivates the subject–object or person–thing distinction is the fact that objects or things in this sense are thought about rather than thinking, that is, are passive rather than active relata of consciousness. This fact is mirrored in the grammatical structure of statements of cognition, which typically feature transitive verbs taking a grammatical object—statements like ‘I see a tree’ or ‘You are reading this book’. Indeed, the terminology of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ clearly draws on these grammatical categories. e.j.l. *vague objects; real. M. Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language, 2nd edn. (London, 1981). E. J. Lowe, Kinds of Being (Oxford, 1989). A. Quinton, The Nature of Things (London, 1973). thinking. In its diverse forms—as *reasoning, believing, reflecting, calculating, deliberating—thinking appears to enjoy an intimate connection with speech, but just what that connection might be is difficult to establish. It is sel- dom, as Plato would have it, a matter of an inward dia- logue carried on by the mind with itself. Not only is wordless thought possible, as when we think how a room would look with the furniture rearranged; it does not even require attention to the matter in question for us to have thought that something was so, as when, tripping on a stair, we say we thought there was one fewer stair than there in fact was. Is thinking that p a matter of being disposed to say that p? This is tempting through making reliance on the spoken word basic, but it does not get us far as it stands. First, while thinking that p we need have no inclination whatso- ever to say that p; at best, the disposition must be restricted by an appropriate condition, as ‘if asked to give our opinion’. Even then there is a supposition that we are speaking truthfully, and this would seem to be a matter of saying what we really think. A more satisfactory charac- terization might run: to think that p is to be in a state of mind expressible by saying that p with an intention to speak the truth. The latter condition is not ‘intending to speak truthfully’, which would again reintroduce think- ing, but ‘intending to say something that is in fact true’. This characterization allows for a suitably loose con- nection between thought and speech in several respects: those who cannot in fact speak are not being denied the capacity to think, and indeed it is possible that someone should suggest a form of words which better expresses another’s thought than the words originally used. It is also allowed that there should be a range of quite different propositions to which one might assent as expressing one’s thought. You ask whether I thought the window was dirty. Yes indeed, I reply, but I could also have agreed if you had asked whether I thought there was a smudge on the window-pane, this being equally adequate to convey- ing how things struck me at the time. It is not as if the for- mulation ventured has to match unspoken words. I did not think in words. On the other hand, the characteriza- tion is also congenial to the idea that there are limits to the range of thoughts possible without language. Lacking the relevant vocabulary, a person could hardly be in a state of mind expressible by saying, with the relevant intention, that Sofia is the capital of Bulgaria. Can animals think? We might say of a monkey which takes refuge from a snake by going up a tree that it knows that it is safe there. We might say this, because the mon- key no longer behaves as if in imminent danger, but observes the snake in a detached fashion. However, while we may be prepared to say that it knows, we may be less happy to say that the monkey thinks that it is safe. That threatens to demand more of the monkey’s mental capaci- ties than we are willing to concede. On the other hand, we need a description for the case where there would be knowledge that p but for the fact that p is false, and while ‘thinks that p’ has the disadvantage of suggesting a mas- tery of concepts, an inner mental response, which it would be fanciful to attribute to the animal, so long as ‘knows that p’ can be affirmed solely on the strength of observed behaviour, the same status can be extended to the ascrip- tion of thought. b.b.r. *belief; cognition; deliberation; understanding; lan- guage of thought. P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind (Oxford, 1990). H. H. Price, Thinking and Experience (London, 1953). G. Ryle, On Thinking (Oxford, 1979). thinking, critical: see critical thinking. thinking causes are causally efficacious *propositional attitudes. Conflict arises over what is required for thinking causes to be causally efficacious. For instance, Donald Davidson only requires that the event be causally related to another event, and that the correct application of men- tal predicates ascribing propositional attitudes supervenes on the correct application of physical predicates. Others argue that something can only be a thinking cause if the event in question is causally efficacious in virtue of its *intentional properties and believe that Davidson’s approach does not capture this requirement. p.j.p.n. *mental causation. D. Davidson, ‘Thinking Causes’, in J. Heil and A. Mele (eds.), Mental Causation (Oxford, 1993). third man argument. Aristotle coined the expression ‘third man’ (which refers to an extra entity beyond the individual man, such as Socrates or Plato, and the general kind man) to designate a notorious ontological-regress argument which first appears in Plato’s Parmenides and has 916 things impressed philosophers ever since. Apparently directed against Plato’s own earlier theory of *Forms, the argu- ment shows that the premisses which are needed to entail the existence of a Form can then be reapplied to entail the existence of further Forms in infinite regress. The nerve of the argument is whether a Platonic Form (or other similar entity) is or is not to be counted in with the other objects which are related to it. There has been vigorous debate about the effectiveness of the argument; a majority main- tain that it exploits genuine deficiencies in Plato’s earlier thought, while a minority argue that he would reject its premisses or reasoning. j.d.g.e. A judicious article from the heyday of modern interest in this argument is Colin Strang, ‘Plato and the Third Man’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. (1963). Thomism. A philosophical–theological movement based upon leading ideas of St Thomas Aquinas. Successive gen- erations have taken his philosophy as a starting-point for their own speculations and have developed his ideas in many directions. Thomism, an ongoing enterprise with its own schools and disputes, is particularly associated with the Catholic Church, although much of his theology has proved acceptable to Christians of a wide variety of denominations and his theological teachings are by no means peculiar to the Catholic Church. Indeed philosoph- ical parts of Thomism, for example on predication, on being, on the nature of mind, and on the relations between law and human nature, do not depend logically upon Christian *dogma and can appeal to people of any religion or none. It should be added that Aquinas’s philoso- phy was never universally accepted by his own Church, and a number of his propositions were denounced in Paris and Oxford in 1277 shortly after his death. In due course while Thomism was establishing itself its proponents, such as John Capreolus, whose title was Prin- ceps Thomistarum (chief of Thomists), had to defend them- selves against other movements, especially those based on the ideas of Duns Scotus and of Ockham. In the sixteenth century, in the face of the Protestant Reformation, Thomism, represented by men such as Domingo de Soto, held a prominent place in the armoury of the Counter- Reformation, and in the nineteenth century, after a period of decline, it gained renewed vigour as a result of a papal bull commending the study of Aquinas. *Neo-Thomism, which was in part a result of that bull, is still with us. Among its exponents are Jacques Maritain and Étienne Gilson. We shall consider here three topics which at dif- ferent times have been high on the agenda of Thomists, namely, the doctrine of analogy, the relation between free will and grace, and probabilism. Thomas de Vio (1468–1534), Cardinal Cajetan, was per- haps the greatest of the Thomists during the earlier stages of the Reformation. His finest work was his commentary on the Summa Theologiae of Aquinas, but in many other books also, such as his De nominum analogia (The Analogy of Names) he attended directly to Aquinas’s doctrines. In that latter work he developed Aquinas’s doctrine of anal- ogy far beyond anything to be found in Aquinas’s writings. The question at issue was the meaning of terms predicated affirmatively of *God, terms such as ‘good’, ‘wise’, and ‘powerful’. Aquinas had said that they should be under- stood neither literally nor negatively but analogically, and though deploying widely the concept of analogy he did not expound it systematically or in detail. Cajetan filled that gap. The crucial move in his systematization was to identify a jointly exhaustive set of three heads of division for ana- logy. Any instance of analogy was an analogy either of inequality, or of attribution, or of proportionality. The first two, however, turn out to be analogies by an improper use of the term ‘analogy’. Only analogy of pro- portionality is analogy properly speaking. Two things are analogous by proportionality if they have a common name and the notion expressed by this name is propor- tionally the same. For example, to see by corporeal vision and to see by intellectual vision are instances of seeing, for just as corporeal seeing presents something to the living body so also the faculty of intellect presents something to the mind. Thus there is a kind of act which is related to the intellect as seeing is related to the living body, and that kind of act is therefore a seeing, analogically speaking, where the analogy is that of proportionality. This kind of analogy is commonly deployed in metaphor, as when we speak of a smiling meadow, on the analogy of a smiling face, for in general people look most attractive when smil- ing, and a meadow, when looking its best, can therefore be described, by analogy of proportionality, as smiling. But it was upon the non-metaphorical uses of analogical terms that Cajetan concentrated, and in so doing he shed a good deal of light on Aquinas’s problem of how we are to make sense of affirmative terms predicated of God in the Bible. God’s goodness, wisdom, and so on are to be understood on an analogy of creaturely goodness and wisdom: as our goodness and wisdom are proportional to us so are God’s proportional to him. There is considerable dispute among Thomists over whether Cajetan’s teaching on analogy faithfully reflects, as he intended, the mind of Aquinas, but there is no doubt that his De nominum analogia is a major Thomist document. A second major area of Thomist thought concerns the relation between human *free will, divine foreknowledge of human acts, and God’s grace. Aquinas had seen the need to refute the argument that God’s foreknowledge of human acts implies that we humans cannot do otherwise than we do. He had no doubt that God knows human acts that lie in the future in relation to us now. This doctrine does not, however, imply that God determines those human acts. He knows them not because he has deter- mined them but because he sees them happening as pre- sent to him, though future in relation to us. Aquinas had also seen the need to deal with the closely related question of whether God’s grace by which a person is saved is something that the recipient freely accepts, or whether his acceptance is determined by God. If his grace is not freely accepted, then a question arises of the contribution if any Thomism 917 that a person can make towards his own salvation or damnation. In the latter part of the sixteenth century a major dispute arose in this area, particularly between Dominican thinkers, whose chief spokesman in this mat- ter was Domingo Bánez, and Jesuits, whose chief spokesman was Luis de Molina. As part of his rejection of Aquinas’s teaching Molina developed the doctrine of scientia media (middle knowledge) and the associated con- cept of a ‘free futurable’, which is an act with a conditional existence, not an act that will be performed or one that might be but in fact will not be, but instead one that would be freely chosen if certain conditions were satisfied. God, as omniscient, must know eternally not only all events (including all free human acts) past, present, or future in relation to us, but also all events which would happen given the satisfaction of certain conditions. God’s middle knowledge of human acts is his knowledge of acts which have this metaphysical status of a ‘would-be’. These acts are the ‘free futurables’. Amongst them are the acceptance by human beings of God’s saving grace. According to Molina God, in an absolutely free act, gives grace in the light of his middle knowledge that the recipient would accept it, and the recipient accepts that grace with an entirely free consent. Thus the doctrine of ‘determinism by grace’ is totally rejected by Molina. Against this teach- ing Domingo Bánez and his fellow Dominicans deployed the concept of praemotio physica (physical pre-motion) and argued, in the spirit of Aquinas, that a person cannot freely accept the grace that God offers unless moved by God to do so. This is a difficult doctrine to maintain, in its own way as difficult as the doctrine of middle knowledge, and the consequent dispute between Dominican Thomists and Jesuit anti-Thomists rumbled on for decades. There is some point to the claim that the Jesuits were standing dan- gerously close to the Pelagian heresy, and that the Dominicans were standing dangerously close to Calvinist teaching on predestination. In the course of his commentary (1577) on a part of the Summa Theologiae of Aquinas, Bartholomew Medina pre- sents a doctrine which he thought of as according to the mind of Aquinas and which has been disputed by Thomists ever since. The doctrine is probabilism. If a per- son wishes to perform a given act and is in doubt over whether the moral law forbids that act, then he is morally at liberty to perform it on condition that the opinion that he is at liberty to perform it is supported by a probable argument, that is, by an argument whose conclusion has some degree of probability, and even if the argument sup- porting the claim that the moral law forbids the act is more probable. There is an evident danger of probabilism lead- ing the unwary into the vice of laxity, when a barely prob- able opinion on the side of liberty will be followed in preference to a highly probable opinion on the side of the moral law. It was because of this danger that some insisted that the opinion on the side of liberty had first to be shown to be soundly based; shaky grounds for acting on the side of liberty are never sufficient. At the other extreme is the vice of rigorism, associated especially with the Jansenists, who argued that in the face of a probable argument on the side of the moral law and another probable argument on the side of liberty, there was always a presumption on the side of the law. Given that probabilism occupies an inter- mediate position between the two extremes of laxity and rigour, there was room for dispute, which duly took place, over how nearly a probabilist may approach one extreme or the other without straying into moral error. There is no doubt that probabilism has its roots in Aquinas’s writings, and the fact that the doctrine is still a matter for dispute is due in part to the very fact that the protagonists in the dis- pute see themselves as enjoying the support of Aquinas. It is precisely this that makes them Thomists. a.bro. *Thomism, analytical. Good accessible material is hard to come by. The following are relevant: É. Gilson, The Spirit of Thomism (New York, 1964). B. Hamilton, Political Thought in Sixteenth Century Spain (Oxford, 1963). Thomas de Vio (Cardinal Cajetan), The Analogy of Names (Louvain, 1959). Thomism, analytical. A broad philosophical approach that brings into mutual relationship the styles and pre- occupations of recent English-speaking philosophy and the concepts and concerns shared by Aquinas and his fol- lowers. This approach bears some relation to that of those post-war Oxford philosophers, e.g. Austin and Ryle, who sought to reintroduce certain concepts into the analysis of thought and action, such as those of capacities and dispos- itions, which are prominent within Aristotelian philoso- phy. In the case of analytical Thomists the primary areas of interest have been intentionality, action, virtue theory, philosophical anthropology, causation, and essentialism. The expression ‘analytical *Thomism’ is rarely employed, but it usefully identifies aspects of the writings of philoso- phers such as Anscombe, Donagan, Geach, Grisez, Kenny, and MacIntyre. j.hal. P. T. Geach, ‘Form and Existence’, in God and the Soul (London, 1969). A. MacIntyre, First Principles, Final Ends and Contemporary Philo- sophical Issues (Milwaukee, 1990). Thomism, neo-: see neo-Thomism. Thomson, Judith Jarvis (1929– ). American philosopher best known for her use of hypothetical examples to elicit intuitions that help to reveal the structure of common- sense morality. The most influential of her arguments of this sort grants the assumption that the foetus is a person but defends the permissibility of *abortion by appealing to an analogous case in which a person can stop providing life support for another innocent person, to whom she has been involuntarily connected, only by killing that person. Thomson believes that rights, which she analyses as non- absolute constraints on the behaviour of those against whom they hold, are the central components of morality. So, for example, she argues that self-defence is permissible 918 Thomism if and only if the person one defends oneself against would otherwise violate one’s rights; for such a person cannot have a right not to be prevented from violating one’s rights. j.m cm. J. J. Thomson, Rights, Restitution, and Risk, ed. William Parent (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). Thoreau, Henry David (1817–62). *New England Tran- scendentalist, natural historian, and social critic, Thoreau proclaimed, in Walden, that most people spend their lives superficially, by pursuing wealth and following custom. Genuinely encountering reality is to be found only by sep- arating oneself from the artificialities of city, economic, and family life and communing directly with nature, where one could ‘front only the essential facts of life’. Nature preserves a spontaneity and wildness that civiliza- tion suppresses; the civil liberties democracy provides are far less important than the spiritual freedom nature embodies and inspires: ‘all good things are wild and free’. *‘Civil disobedience’ is the classic defence of conscience above unjust law. One must not support an immoral law and can protest by, for example, not paying taxes that implement it, or refusing to obey it and accepting a jail term. This appeals to the conscience of others and so begins a social movement. c.c. Leo Stoller, After Walden: Thoreau’s Changing Views on Economic Man (Stanford, Calif., 1957). thought: see thinking; cognition; language of thought. thought, language of: see language of thought. thought, laws of: see laws of thought. thought experiments are employed both by philoso- phers and by theoretical scientists to examine the implica- tions of theories and to explore the boundaries of concepts. They are controlled exercises of the imagination in which test cases are envisaged with a view to establish- ing their conceptual coherence or their compatibility with some proposed theory. For example, in assessing the mer- its of rival theories of *personal identity, philosophers commonly propose thought experiments envisaging the consequences of procedures which would apparently result in the fission or fusion of persons—for instance, brain bisection followed by transplantation of the two cerebral hemispheres into separate bodies. Some philosophers object vehemently to the philo- sophical use of thought experiments as substituting fan- tasy for reality, but since philosophical argument is often concerned to establish precisely what is possible, it is hard to see how philosophy could do without them altogether. e.j.l. R. A. Sorensen, Thought Experiments (New York, 1992). Thrasymachus. Notable figure in Plato’s Republic. Having had enough of the preceding high-minded, convivial but thin discussion of justice, Thrasymachus falls on Socrates and his interlocutors like a beast, arguing that justice is nothing else than the advantage of the stronger. Some interpret Thrasymachus as claiming that justice is nothing deeper than the bare fact that those in power enact laws which protect their interests—justice is nothing more than the weak obeying the will of the strong. Some see Thrasymachus as arguing for more: it is just that the strong ought to rule the weak, and justice consists in the strong holding sway. Might makes right. Thrasymachus is claimed as spokesman by nihilists, ethical egoists, rela- tivists, and realists. j.gar. Plato, Republic 336b–354c. threats and offers. Threats express intentions to inflict injury or damage. They are menacing proposals, paradig- matically expressed in ‘Your money or your life’. Offers, by contrast, are proposals that expand opportunities: ‘I’ll pay you $10 to weed the garden.’ Threats can masquerade as offers. Since they present pairs of options, their surface grammar can suggest expansion of opportunity. Such pro- posals none the less are threats just in case either option would leave one worse off than one would otherwise have been. In standard cases, such a set-back is measured relative to the welfare one would have enjoyed had one not encountered the robber in the first place. In other cases, the set-back is measured against a morally defined baseline, which includes the welfare one should enjoy as one’s due: a proposal to stop beating you if you weed the garden constitutes a threat. Thus threats, in contrast to offers, are coercive, which is not to say that all offers are morally innocent—they may be disrespectful, exploita- tive, or exert undue influence. a.car. m.l. *coercion. A. Wertheimer, Coercion (Princeton, NJ, 1987). time. The dimension of *change, a fact which distin- guishes it from the three dimensions of *space. But how does genuine temporal change differ from mere variation as exhibited in space? When a road is said to change in breadth along its length, ‘change’ is being used only metaphorically, in contrast to its literal use when a child is said to change in height as it becomes older. Some theories of time and change do not really accommodate this dis- tinction, and as such are sometimes accused of ‘spatializ- ing’ time or denying the reality of temporal ‘becoming’. Some philosophers believe, indeed, that developments in physics connected with the theory of *relativity necessi- tate this denial, because they seem to demonstrate that the notion of an absolute ‘now’ must be abandoned along with the Newtonian notion of the absoluteness of simul- taneity. Events deemed ‘past’ in one frame of reference must be deemed ‘future’ in other frames, apparently indi- cating that the distinction between past and future is only a subjective, experientially based one rather than reflect- ing a genuine ontological divide. Philosophers of this per- suasion adopt what is commonly called a ‘static’ view of time 919 . utterances, we can call such reasoning a theory; although the term ‘theory of mind’ is often used just to refer to the ability to attribute mental states to others. To explain this ability, many philosophers. understanding of others, whereas ‘theory’ theory privileges the third-personal observation of others. b.c.s. M. Davies and T. Stone, Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate (Oxford, 1995). theosophy infinite regress. The nerve of the argument is whether a Platonic Form (or other similar entity) is or is not to be counted in with the other objects which are related to it. There has been vigorous