The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 97 pptx

vagueness. Words like ‘smart’, ‘tall’, and ‘fat’ are vague, since in most contexts of use there is no clear line sep- arating them from ‘not smart’, ‘not tall’, and ‘not fat’ respectively. Vagueness needs to be distinguished from *ambiguity, which is a property of a word with two dis- tinct meanings. Whereas ‘is drunk’ is vague; ‘is at the bank’ (river? commercial?) is ambiguous. Vague terms are said to be tolerant, in that they are used in settings where small changes (e.g. in colour) often make no difference to us. How we react to vagueness can vary. We can tolerate or even approve of vagueness, as when we engage in diplomatic negotiations. Or we can react less tolerantly by viewing vagueness as a kind of language failure (‘I can’t tell where your land ends and mine begins’). n.f. Rosanna Keefe and Peter Smith (eds.), Vagueness: A Reader (Cambridge, 1997). vague objects. If they exist, they challenge the common idea that reality itself is not vague, only our representa- tions of it being so. If, for example, Mount Everest is a vague object, it has vague boundaries; some rocks are nei- ther clearly part of it nor clearly not part of it. Thus the vagueness is not blamed on the name ‘Everest’, which is allowed to refer determinately to a unique, vague moun- tain. Vagueness may also infect temporal boundaries (e.g. the moment of death). Vague objects are identical only if they have the same clear parts and the same clear non- parts; it is controversial whether this relation too can be vague. One can suppose an object vague without suppos- ing it indeterminate, if one (controversially) regards its vagueness as the impossibility of finding its sharp boundaries. t.w. T. Williamson, Vagueness (London, 1994). Vaihinger, Hans (1852–1933). German philosopher, who from his study of Kant and Nietzsche derived the Philoso- phy of As If (Die Philosophie des Als Ob (1911; tr. London, 1924)). Sensations and feelings are real, but the rest of human knowledge consists of pragmatically justified ‘fictions’. The laws of logic are fictions that have proved their indispensable worth in experience and are thus held to be undeniably true. Of a religious or metaphysical doctrine, we should ask not whether it is true in some non- pragmatist sense (we cannot discover this), but whether it is useful to act as if it were true. (The concepts of fiction and as-if vary, Vaihinger concedes, according to different types of truth, e.g. logical, scientific, religious.) The theory involves familiar, though not necessarily insurmountable, difficulties. In saying that we should act as if a doctrine were ‘true’, it presupposes a perhaps ineliminable non-pragmatist notion of truth. (If we expli- cate this occurrence of ‘true’ in pragmatist terms, we fall into an infinite regress: ‘We should act as if we should act as if, etc.’) According to the theory, claims about the utility of holding doctrines, and indeed the theory itself, will themselves be no more than useful fictions. m.j.i. *pragmatism. A. Seidel (ed.), Die Philosophie des Als Ob und das Leben: Festschrift zu Hans Vaihingers 80 Geburtst (Berlin, 1932). validity. In logic, validity is most commonly attributed to either: 1. Deductive arguments, which are such that if the pre- misses are true the conclusion must be true. Traditional logic studies the validity of syllogistic arguments. Modern logic, more generally, identifies as valid those arguments which accord with truth-preserving rules. (*Salva veritate.) Any argument is valid if and only if the set consisting of its premisses and the negation of its conclusion is inconsistent. 2. Propositions which are semantically valid, i.e. are true under any alternative interpretation of the non- logical words. In a formal uninterpreted system of logic a derivation is (syntactically) valid where it is in accordance with speci- fied axioms or rules. r.b.m. *completeness; theorem; logic, traditional. B. Mates, Elementary Logic (Oxford, 1972). Valla, Lorenzo (c.1407–57). Italian humanist who pro- moted rhetoric, grammar, and philology at the expense of scholastic logic and metaphysics. He reduced logic to a tool of rhetoric and held that most metaphysical termin- ology was nothing more than ungrammatical jargon which should be replaced by a philosophical discourse based on the accepted usage of the best ancient Latin V authors. Highly critical of the philosophical theology of medieval thinkers such as Aquinas, he wanted to return to the rhetorical theology of the Church Fathers. For Valla certain issues, such as the compatibility of divine predestin- ation and human *free will, had to be accepted as matters of faith and were not open to rational investigation. In ethics, he championed a Christianized version of *Epicureanism, which saw the highest good in the pleasure which the soul attains in the afterlife. j.a.k. O. Besomi and M. Regoliosi (eds.), Lorenzo Valla e l’umanesimo italiano (Padua, 1986). value. Philosophical concern with value has focused on three connected issues: first, on what sort of property or characteristic of something its ‘having value’ or ‘being of value’ is; second, on whether having value is an objective or subjective matter, whether value reposes in the object or is a matter of how we feel towards it; third, on trying to say what things have value, are valuable. These concerns closely parallel concerns with the nature of good, from which value is seldom carefully distinguished in philo- sophical discussion, though the terms are clearly not synonymous. In regard to the first concern, the value something has is clearly not a property of it which can be discerned by the senses or by scientific measuring instruments. This may be because it is a sui generis property, requiring a special sort of awareness or thought process to detect it. Or it could be a relational property of things, such as their meet- ing human needs; or not a property of things at all but rather a matter of the loving regard we pay to things. Something would thus be called ‘valuable’ in so far as we cherish it, though common-sense might well say that this gets matters the wrong way round: we cherish it because it is valuable. Plainly, the view reached about what sort of character- istic having value is will strongly influence any view about whether it is an objective or subjective matter. Presum- ably if having value is a sui generis property, then whether or not something has value cannot depend on human opinion, but is a matter of fact. On the other hand if to bear a cherishing regard towards something is what thinking it valuable consists in, then it would seem that whether something has value is a subjective issue. It can be argued that such regard could be appropriate or inappropriate, and thus some standard of correctness of attitude could be introduced, giving some measure of objectivity. On the third matter, of what things have value, clearly the list is endless. Many things have value to people because of a special role they play in their lives. This is not to be confused with a subjective theory of the nature of value. It could be an objective truth that something which holds special significance in the life of a person will have value for that person. Other things, such as human life, are sometimes said to have absolute value. Value may be inherent or intrinsic or relational, extrinsic. The task of a ‘valuer’ of jewellery or property is an interesting one. Does he, like Oscar Wilde’s cynic, ‘know the price of everything and the value of nothing’? Or does he have more discerning judgement than the rest of us? Or perhaps indeed his approval helps to set the value of the thing he is looking at. n.j.h.d. *good; axiological ethics; ethics and aesthetics; super- valuation. Notable discussions of these, and, many related topics are: J. N. Findlay, Values and Intentions (London, 1966). N. Hartmann, Ethics (London, 1932). J. Laird, The Idea of Value (Cambridge, 1929). C. I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (La Salle, Ill., 1946). value, aesthetic. We say that the performance of an opera was good, that one painting is a finer example of a certain style than another, or that a combination of colours looks just right. The ‘good’, ‘fine’, and ‘right’, in these cases appear to concern a kind of value which is nei- ther moral value, nor utility value, nor the rightness of being true. We have to acknowledge that there is a pecu- liarly aesthetic way of being ‘good’ or ‘right’, or at least that people talk as if there is. The traditional way of mark- ing out aesthetic value from truth, goodness, or utility is to provide an account of *beauty. With all *value, philosophers will sooner or later ask whether it is objective or subjective, whether it is really in the objects of which we appear to predicate it, or only a product of the mind of the judging subject. If the former, it is arguable that what is ‘in’ the object will be a power to affect the mind in a certain way, so that a thing may have a real value in a way parallel to its having a real colour, as some would see it. In the history of aesthetics, views range from the notion that beauty resides as an objective prop- erty in objects, through to ideas more akin to the popular saying ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. Philosophers should be wary of subscribing to this slogan. For there is public discourse about aesthetic standards, and *aesthetic judgements are usually put forward as true, not merely as reports of one person’s subjective response. The central problem concerning aesthetic value is that it is not merely in the eye of the beholder, while yet it seems to require the eye of the beholder in order to exist. c.j. I. Kant, Critique of Judgement, tr. J. C. Meredith (Oxford, 1969). E. Schaper (ed.), Pleasure, Preference and Value: Studies in Philosoph- ical Aesthetics (Cambridge, 1983). value, error theory of: see error theory of value. value, instrumental: see instrumental value. values, transvaluation of: see transvaluation of values. values and facts: see fact–value distinction. van Fraassen, Bas C. (1941– ). Princeton logician and philosopher of science who, in The Scientific Image (1980), develops a well-reasoned anti-realist empiricist alternative to both the *Logical Positivism of van Fraassen, Bas C. 941 Rudolf Carnap and the scientific realism of Wilfrid Sellars and Hilary Putnam. For the realist, the point of construct- ing scientific theories is to ‘aim to give us a literally true story of what the world is like’. So accepting any scientific theory is supposed to involve, automatically, belief that terms describing postulated structures and processes have existential import. Van Fraassen attacks this position and defends an alternative: empirical adequacy is the only aim of scientific theorizing. The belief that the theory fits the observable phenomena is the only belief involved in accepting a scientific theory; explanatory power is not grounds for believing that all theoretical terms refer. In Laws and Symmetry (1989), van Fraassen argues against a realist construal of *laws of nature and natural necessities. b.t. *realism and anti-realism. Paul M. Churchland and Clifford A. Hooker (eds.), Images of Sci- ence: Essays on Realism and Empiricism, with a Reply from Bas C. van Fraassen (Chicago, 1985). B. C. van Fraassen, The Empirical Stance (New Haven, Conn., 2002). variable. A letter substituted for one or more occurrences of an expression in a wider expression, as in ‘x admires x’. When a *quantifier is prefixed to this, the variable is ‘bound’. Only if repeated variables or two or more quanti- fiers are involved is this apparatus necessary, the letter attached to each prefixed quantifier indicating which vari- able it binds in the remaining sentence. See the example given in the entry ‘quantifier’. c.j.f.w. W. V. Quine, ‘Variables Explained Away’, in Selected Logic Papers (New York, 1966). variable realization. An argument of Hilary Putnam’s against the type-*identity theory of mind: the theory that mental properties are physical properties. On this view, every instance of a mental property is an instance of the physical property with which that mental property is iden- tical. But it seems very unlikely that every instance of pain is an instance of the same brain property. A creature could have a very different physical nature from us, yet still be in pain: this possibility renders the type-identity theory empirically implausible. t.c. *realization. Hilary Putnam, ‘The Mental Life of Some Machines’, in Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, ii (Cambridge, 1975). Vattimo, Gianni (1936– ). A scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy, which he teaches at the University of Turin, he is the leading Italian theorist of *post-modernism. Vattimo believes that the modern, *Enlightenment project of human emancipation as the unfolding of reason through the self-conscious appropri- ation of nature and the rational organization of society, has been undermined by the effects of new technology and the mass media upon contemporary societies. These developments have produced a complex and fragmented world, in which the continual elaboration of numerous heterogeneous interpretative schemata has removed the possibility of any privileged or ‘objective’ point of view upon which to build a unitary or progressive conception of human history. He argues that this situation produces a ‘weak ontology’ that demands a corresponding weaken- ing of philosophy’s traditional metaphysical aspirations in the direction of ‘weak thought’ (pensiero debole), an approach he associates with the notions of *nihilism and difference elaborated by Nietzsche and Heidegger. r.p.b. Richard Bellamy, ‘Post-Modernism and the End of History’, Theory, Culture and Society (1987). Veda¯nta. End or cream of the revealed scriptures of the Hindus (collectively called ‘Veda’), which traditionally includes the more philosophical *Upanishads, a root-text called Brahma Su¯tras, and the ethico-religious text *Bhagavadgı¯ta¯. The philosophy contained in the Upani- shads is polemically distilled in the Brahma Su¯tras, which are aphorisms regarding the Supreme Reality. These aphorisms, ascribed to Ba¯dara¯yan . a (second or first century bc) controvert heterodox views like atheism, and respond to the problem of evil, naturalism, no-self theories, etc. They seek to establish God as the material and efficient cause of the cosmos, they analyse dreaming, deep sleep, life after death, re-embodiment, and the state of libera- tion, and they prescribe techniques of meditation leading to that state. Competing commentaries on the Brahma Su¯tras engendered schools of Veda¯nta such as the non- dualism of *S ´ an . kara, the qualified monism of *Ra¯ma¯nuja, the dualism of *Madhva, the identity-in-difference of Nı¯mbarka, etc. Non-dualist Veda¯nta upholds absolute subjective con- sciousness as the only reality, regards the external world of plurality as false appearance, and establishes that the indi- vidual self is strictly identical with that absolute con- sciousness. This eventually enables each of us to realize the Vedic truth ‘I am all that exists’. Qualified monists and dualists reject the above monistic views and interpret the Brahma Su¯tras differently. In the late nineteenth century S ´ ri Ramakrishna, an unlettered mystic saint, rejuvenated Vedantic Hinduism, winning over Christian missionaries and Unitarian- influenced reformers by reaffirming the catholic Vedic truth that the same spiritual goal of God-realization can be attained through many alternative routes adopted by dif- ferent religions of the world. His disciple Swami Viveka¯nanda stole the show at the 1893 Parliament of Religions in Chicago by his eloquent opposition to sectar- ian exclusivism and advocacy of what he later called ‘prac- tical Veda¯nta’, i.e. an active recognition of the divinity in every living being to be achieved by serving each living being like God. This is more than altruism or social service because it has to be based on contemplative faith in the spiritual oneness of all. Among professional philosophers the influence of Kant and Hegel mingled with the resurrection of Veda¯nta to 942 van Fraassen, Bas C. produce neo-Veda¯ntists like K. C. Bhattacharya, whose strikingly original phenomenology of bodily, introspect- ive, and spiritual subjectivity yields a very subtle but ill- understood theory of the ‘unmeant’ self as freedom from all objectification. a.c. K. C. Bhattacharya, Search for the Absolute in Neo-Veda¯nta (Hon- olulu, 1976). Eliot Deutsch, Advaita Veda¯nta: A Philosophical Reconstruction (Honolulu, 1969). Veda, Vedic: see Indian philosophy; Veda¯nta. vegetarianism. The view that we should avoid eating meat or fish has ancient philosophical roots. In the Hindu *Upanishads (about 1000 bc) the doctrine of reincarnation leads to opposition to eating meat. Buddha taught com- passion for all sentient creatures. Buddhist monks were not to kill *animals, nor to eat meat, unless they knew that the animal had not been killed for their sake. Jains hold to ahimsa, or non-violence toward any living creature, and accordingly do not eat meat. In the Western tradition, Genesis suggests that the first diet of human beings was vegetarian, and permission to eat meat was given only after the Flood. After that, vege- tarianism gains little support from either the Jewish or Christian scriptures, or from Islam. Philosophical vegetar- ianism was stronger in ancient Greece and Rome: it was supported by Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plutarch, Plot- inus, Porphyry, and, in some passages, Plato. Pythagor- eans abstained from eating animals partly because of their belief that humans and animals share a common soul, and partly because they appear to have considered the diet a healthier one. Plato shared both these views to some extent. Plutarch’s essay On Eating Flesh, written in the late first or early second century of the Christian era, is a detailed argument for vegetarianism on grounds of justice and humane treatment of animals. Interest in vegetarianism revived in the nineteenth cen- tury, on grounds of health and humanity towards animals. Notable vegetarian thinkers included the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Henry Salt (who wrote a pioneering vol- ume entitled Animals’ Rights), and George Bernard Shaw, who said that he put into his plays the ideas that he learned from Salt. In Germany Arthur Schopenhauer urged that ethically we should become vegetarian, were it not for the fact that the human race cannot exist without animal food ‘in the north’! Since the 1970s vegetarianism has gained strength from three major lines of argument: health, ecology, and con- cern for animals. The first of these grounds rests on a sci- entific, rather than philosophical, claim and will not be discussed further here. Ecological concerns about eating meat arise from the well-documented inefficiency of much animal-raising. This applies especially to intensive farming, in which grain is grown on good agricultural land and fed to animals confined indoors, or in the case of cattle, in crowded feed-lots. Much of the nutritional value of the grain is lost in the process, and this form of animal production is also energy-intensive. Hence concern for world hunger, for the land, and for energy conservation provide an ethical basis for a vegetarian diet, or at least one in which meat consumption is minimized. Arguments for a reassessment of the moral status of animals have also given support to vegetarianism. If ani- mals have rights, or are entitled to have their interests given equal consideration with the similar interests of human beings, it is easy to see that there are difficulties in claiming that we are entitled to eat non-human animals (but not, presumably, human beings, even if through some accident they are at a similar mental level to the ani- mals we do eat). These ethical arguments for vegetarian- ism may be based on the view that we violate the rights of animals when we kill them for our food, or on the more utilitarian grounds that, in raising them for our food, we cause them more suffering than we gain by eating their flesh. p.s. Keith Akers, A Vegetarian Sourcebook, 2nd edn. (Denver, 1989). Francis Moore Lappé, Diet for a Small Planet, 2nd edn. (New York, 1985). Tom Regan and Peter Singer (eds.), Animal Rights and Human Obligations, 2nd edn. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1989). veil of ignorance. The setting-aside of all information about your distinguishing social characteristics, to ensure a fair choice of principles of justice. In Rawls’s theory, it is a feature of the *original position, an imaginary situation in which you are supposed to make a blind choice of prin- ciples, as if not knowing what position you occupy in soci- ety—not knowing your race, sex, religion, wealth, talents, or ultimate values and aims in life. The idea is that this will force you to choose as if you might be in any social pos- ition, so that you must take into account the interests of everyone equally, thus ensuring fairness to all. t.n. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). veil of perception. This is a sceptical problem that arises for a certain analysis of perception. If our senses only reveal knowledge about how things seem, how can we hope to use them to find out how things really are? The appearances are in danger of obstructing rather than helping us in our attempts to discern the nature of reality. The obvious way to escape this difficulty is to hold that in perception we are directly aware of material things, not just of appearances; the name for such a position is *naïve or direct realism. Something still needs to be said about appearances. One promising line is the adverbial theory, which holds that appearances themselves are not the primary objects for the mind, but the way in which our primary objects are presented. j.d. F. Jackson, Perception (Cambridge, 1977). vengeance: see revenge. verifiability: see verification principle. verifiability 943 verification principle. This, also called the Verifiability Principle, has two forms: (1) The meaning of a statement is the method of its verification. (2) A statement is mean- ingful if and only if it is in principle verifiable. (1) implies (2) but not all recognize the converse implication. Verifi- cation may cover only observational procedures, in which case the principle is applied only to ‘factual’ statements, allegedly analytic statements (including pure mathemat- ics), somehow true by definition, receiving a separate treatment. Alternatively, verification may cover calcula- tions for establishing these. The verification principle was a main tenet of the original Logical Positivists, inspired by remarks of Wittgenstein. Prominent supporters have included Moritz Schlick and A. J. Ayer. Problems have been its judgement on itself and the fact that any state- ment will have verifiable implications if conjoined with suitably chosen others. None the less the general idea that genuinely factual knowledge must increase our powers of empirical prediction has influenced many. t.l.s.s *Logical Positivism; verificationism; nonsense. verificationism. Any view which embraces some version of the *verification principle. Verificationists characterize the meaning of a proposition, or the conditions required for a proposition to have meaning, in terms of the differ- ence its truth makes to the senses, the conditions under which it is verified (or falsified) by empirical test. Vari- ations on both the principle itself and its implications are possible. Perhaps the most influential thinkers in this neighbourhood are gathered together under the banner of *Logical Positivism—A. J. Ayer, Rudolph Carnap, Her- bert Feigle, Ernest Nagel, Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick and others—all offering articulations of both the verifica- tion principle and its implications for metaphysics, aes- thetics, and ethics. Some phenomenalist philosophers have derived from verificationism the view that state- ments about physical objects are reducible to talk of sense- data, actual and possible sense experiences. The difficulty, which most take as decisive, is that the list of conditional observation statements for any reduction would be very long and worryingly vague. Abandoning reduction, Car- nap was led to conclude that the best one can hope for is a specification of the observation statements implied by particular non-observation statements. Quine, holding that theories are underdetermined by evidence and fol- lowing Duhem’s claim that non-observation sentences cannot be verified individually, did not on those grounds reject verificationism, but instead concluded that a non- observation sentence has no meaning in isolation, has no empirical consequences of its own, makes no difference to our senses individually. Individual sentences mean what they do only against the backdrop of the theory in which they are embedded. j.gar. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London, 1946). R. Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World (London, 1967). W. V. O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass., 1953). verisimilitude. A concept of central importance within Popper’s anti-inductivist philosophy of science, but also of independent interest. Given a view of science as a para- digm of rational activity, it seems natural to take its goal to be the production of true theories. But all past *theories have turned out to be false, and only wild immodesty could let us suppose that currently accepted theories will escape such an ultimate fate. How can it be rational to pur- sue an unattainable goal? How can there be scientific progress in these circumstances? One answer is to suggest that science has the more limited goal of developing the- ories which approximate more closely to the *truth, i.e. possess increasing verisimilitude. However, there are severe problems involved both in defining and in developing a measure or ranking-mechanism of, verisimilitude. j.l. W. H. Newton-Smith, The Rationality of Science (London, 1981). Veritatis Splendor. The title, taken from its opening words, ‘The Splendour of Truth’, of the most widely dis- cussed of recent papal encyclicals. In it Pope John Paul II responds to *subjectivism, *relativism, and *consequen- tialism, and reaffirms traditional Catholic teaching that there is an objective universal moral order (*natural law) involving intrinsic goods and evils. The philosophical exposition and argument draw primarily upon Thomist and neo-Kantian moral theories. The main philosophical discussion is in a section called ‘The Moral Act’, where it is argued that ‘The rational ordering of the human act to the good in its truth and the voluntary pursuit of that good, known by reason, constitute morality. Hence human activity cannot be judged as morally good merely because it is a means for attaining one or another of its goals, or simply because the subject’s intention is good.’ j.hal. Veritatis Splendor: Encyclical Letter Regarding Certain Fundamental Questions of the Church’s Moral Teaching (London, 1993). Verstehen. Although this is the ordinary German word for understanding, philosophers have often invested it with special senses. For Kant, understanding is the faculty, distinguished from sensibility and reason, whereby sensory items are brought under concepts. Within *hermeneutics (the study of interpretation) and the *social sciences, however, it usually has the sense given it by Wilhelm Dilthey: an interpretative understanding sharply distinguished from the explanatory understand- ing, in terms of natural laws, sought in the natural sci- ences. Verstehen is therefore confined to the humane sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). While, for Dilthey, Verste- hen requires an empathetic ‘re-living’ of the ‘mental life’ of those whose ‘expressions’—texts, actions, etc.—we seek to interpret, his main emphasis is upon identifying the expressions’ meanings by locating them in larger cultural wholes. ‘Meaning means nothing except belonging to a whole’ (1968, p. 233). An expression is only fully under- stood when referred back to the total cultural ‘life-form’ (*form of life) that it manifests. The distinctive character 944 verification principle of Verstehen informs the writings of such social theorists as Alfred Schutz and Peter Winch. d.e.c. W. Dilthey, Dilthey: Selected Writings, tr. H. P. Rickman (Cambridge, 1968). A. O’Hear (ed.), Verstehen and Humane Understanding (Cambridge, 1996). vices. States of bad or undesirable character, definable partly in contrast to *virtues. The favoured list of vices varies across time and place, depending on differences in corresponding conceptions of virtue. Thus, the change from classical pagan to medieval Christian morality brought with it a change of emphasis from the virtues of courage and temperance to the virtues of love and charity, with corresponding vices being defined in contrast to these virtues. On the classical Aristotelian view, a paradig- matic vice consists in the possession of some character trait out of proportion to the nature of its associated object. Thus, a coward is someone who fears what is not dangerous. On this view, vice is understood negatively in terms of a failure to possess virtuous character traits. One limitation of this view is that it fails to fully account for such bad character traits as cruelty, maliciousness, and spite, which consist partly in an agent consciously aiming for the bad. h.l. *virtue. M. Midgley, Wickedness (London, 1984). vicious circle. An argument assuming its conclusion as a premiss (*begging the question), or a definition of an expression in terms of itself. Russell argued that paradoxes in the foundations of mathematics—for example, his para- dox of the class of all classes that are not members of them- selves—depend on a kind of vicious circularity, violating the maxim ‘Whatever involves all of a collection must not be one of the collection’. m.c. *vicious-circle principle. vicious-circle principle. First propounded by Poincaré in 1906 as a diagnosis of the contradictions then besetting logicism. The basic idea is that a vicious circle is involved if, in the definition of an object of some kind, we quantify over all objects of the same kind. Definitions with this fea- ture are called ‘impredicative’, others ‘predicative’. (For example, the set of all natural numbers is commonly defined as the least set containing 0 and containing the suc- cessor of everything it contains. But this definition is impredicative, since the ‘least’ such set means the one that is a subset of all such sets.) Russell claimed to base his the- ory of *types upon this principle, but that claim can hardly be upheld. Gödel observed that from a Platonist stand- point there need be nothing wrong with impredicative definitions, though they should be suspected by the con- ceptualist, who holds that abstract objects exist only as a result of our constructions. d.b. *predicative theories; constructivism; impredicative definition. K. Gödel, ‘Russell’s Mathematical Logic’, in P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (Evanston, Ill., 1944). B. Russell, ‘Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types’, in R. C. Marsh (ed.), Logic and Knowledge (London, 1956). Vico, Giambattista (1668–1744). Arguably the most sig- nificant Italian philosopher, he was Professor of Rhetoric at the university of his native Naples from 1699. Underly- ing Vico’s thought is the principle that ‘the true (verum) and the made (factum) are convertible’, so that we can only know for certain that which we have created. The natural sciences can only yield approximate truths based on our attempts to imitate nature in experiments, whereas the human sciences can offer exact knowledge because soci- eties are our own creations. Vico used this thesis in his The New Science of 1725 to develop a whole philosophy of his- tory that anticipated many of the central tenets of nine- teenth-century *historicism. He argued that historical change parallels the passage of the individual from birth to maturity and ultimately death, so that history follows a cyclical pattern of corsi and ricorsi in which linguistic, cul- tural, intellectual, political, and economic development are all interrelated. Past societies had to be understood in their own terms, and social change was to be seen as the unintended and providential product of the evolving needs, reason, and interests of essentially egoistic individuals. r.p.b. L. Pompa, Vico (Cambridge, 1975). Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis). A group whose work was central to the development of *Logical Positivism. The Circle emerged from discussions, beginning in 1907, between Otto Neurath, a sociologist, Hans Hahn, a mathematician, and Philip Frank, a physicist. Like its founders, most Circle members, including its philoso- phers, had considerable scientific and mathematical training. The Circle flourished under the leadership of Moritz Schlick, who filled Ernst Mach’s chair at the Uni- versity of Vienna in 1922. But the rise of Nazism in the 1930s led to a diaspora of the Circle’s members, many of whom were Jewish, Marxist, or both. Herbert Feigl left in 1931, arriving eventually at the University of Min- nesota, where he helped build an influential philosophy of science programme. Rudolf Carnap, who came to Vienna in 1926, left in 1931. He was installed at the University of Chicago in 1936, the year Schlick was assassinated in Vienna on the university steps. In 1938 the Circle’s last Vienna organization was officially dissolved, Neurath and Friedrich Waismann went to Oxford, and Kurt Gödel went to Princeton. Tarski’s work on the semantics of formal languages and Popper’s attempts to explain the difference between real and spurious science were important influences on the Circle. Another was the work of Wittgenstein. His Tracta- tus was read aloud and studied line by line by Vienna Circle members, a few of whom were allowed to meet him—in diminishing numbers, and varying configur- ations and degrees of discomfort—from 1927 into the Vienna Circle 945 early 1930s. From these discussions emerged a strong version of the *‘verification principle’ according to which the significance of non-analytic sentences depends upon whether they can be tested, and utterances which are neither analytic nor empirically testable are meaningless. Different versions of this principle are distinguished by the strengths of their testability requirements. Vienna Circle philosophizing utilized logical machin- ery invented by Frege, Russell, and Whitehead (long before its general acceptance) and formal techniques in semantics and inductive reasoning, many of which were invented or enriched by its members. These tools were applied to classical philosophical issues concerning the nature and possibility of knowledge. The main examples of knowledge the Circle urged philosophers to study came from the exact sciences, which it supposed were models of properly conducted inquiry whose epistemic standards should be extended to the social sciences. This, along with its demanding formalisms, helped make Vienna Circle philosophy unpopular among academics who considered their work more humane. So did the Circle’s crusade against ‘metaphysics’, its derogatory term for discourse which purports to make substantive claims but which is susceptible neither to rigorous empirical testing nor to for- mally rigorous explication. It offended intellectuals to have words they lived by (and made a living from) con- demned as metaphysics. Others were unhappy for political reasons which should be taken seriously by anyone interested in the his- tory of analytic philosophy. A host of German philoso- phers—Heidegger, for one—were promoting the idea that only pure Germans could understand, and should be allowed to teach, subjects bearing on German history and culture. Hitler, supported by no less than Nobel Laureate physicist Philipp Lenard, vowed to save German youth from un-German science, including relativity and quan- tum physics. The discourse used to justify such positions included some targets of the Circle’s war against meta- physics. ‘The tear is running . . . It’d be to throw up, if one didn’t have to laugh . . . . behind it all stands Hitler . . . Here come God, and Religion . . . and ancestral truths, and the German Volk, and what you need to stab a Jewish socialist . . . between the ribs . . . Oh Carnap! Oh World!’ That was Neurath in 1932 (quoted in Gallison, ‘Aufbau/Bauhaus’, 742), describing the situation the Vienna Circle and other positivists faced as they developed and promulgated for- mal methods in philosophy, set the agenda for twentieth- century philosophy of science, and helped to invent *analytical philosophy. j.b.b. T. R. Baldwin (ed.), The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945 (Cambridge, 2003). Rudolf Carnap, ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, in Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (La Salle, Ill., 1963). J. Alberto Coffa, The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station (Cambridge, 1991). Peter Gallison, ‘Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Archi- tectural Modernism’, Critical Inquiry (1990). violence, democratic: see democratic violence. violence, political. Resort to force for political ends, out- side its normal use in international warfare or in the inter- nal administration of justice. Political violence covers a wide spectrum from stone-throwing at demonstrations to *revolution and civil war. Violence is conventionally dis- tinguished from force in general as unlawful; thus political violence oversteps the limits placed upon the lawful pur- suit of political purposes. Indeed the breaking of laws is sometimes part of the point of violent protest, as it is in *civil disobedience; for political violence is characteristic- ally expressive of its political purposes (e.g. by challeng- ing the authority of the *state to enforce its laws) rather than simply instrumental in achieving them (e.g. by undermining the power of the state). *Terrorism is the paradigm of political violence, but it eludes easy definition. One type of analysis views it as political killing rendered illegitimate, in contrast to tyran- nicide, either by the availability of peaceful alternatives or by its targeting of innocent citizens rather than respons- ible politicians. Another type regards terrorism as low- level warfare directed, contrary to the principles of the *just war, against harmless civilians, often owing to the terrorists’ lack of adequate resources to defeat a military force. Neither analysis seems adequate to cover what is regularly referred to as terrorism, namely, activity which is regarded by its protagonists as part of a war and by its opponents as common crime (or, perhaps, as a crime against humanity but not, strictly speaking, as a war crime). Characterizing terrorism in these terms we can sensibly ask: When, if ever, is terrorism justified? On some theories of deontological ethics it is never justified, either because it inevitably involves the death of innocents, or because it is in breach of political obligations. Under *utilitarianism, however, it may be justified if it is likely to avert a greater evil. Typically terrorists not only appeal to utilitarian con- siderations but also answer deontologists by arguing either that innocents are unintended victims who suffer no more, and perhaps less, than in conventional war, or that the citizens who are targeted have collective respon- sibility as members of an oppressor group. Terrorists also deny the existence of political obligations to a state which is oppressive or which they refuse to recognize, e.g. when they are actuated by *nationalism. In neither case, they argue, are there adequate alternatives to the adoption of military means for pursuing their political goals. As a result, terrorists, under the influence of one or other of the analyses mentioned above, deny that they are terrorists, rather than freedom fighters etc., since on these analyses terrorism is always unjustified. Political violence includes not only the use of force against the state, but also some of its uses by, or on behalf of, the state, e.g. state terrorism, as directed against minor- ity groups under Fascism. Though the law may be changed to accommodate it, it still has the criminal char- acter of terrorism, since ‘unjust law is not law’, while it is 946 Vienna Circle intended as part of a war against those to whom the state recognizes no obligation of care. The distinction between political violence and the ostensibly legitimate use of force may itself be called into question if the actions of some, or all, states are thought of as aimed at terrorizing their sub- jects into submission. Such *‘structural violence’ is, in a loose sense, criminal, through infringing natural rights, and warlike, since ‘government is begotten of aggression and by aggression’ (Herbert Spencer). It may be held to justify a response comprising more overt political violence. p.g. Ted Honderich, Terrorism for Humanity (London, 2004). Burleigh Taylor Williams, Terrorism and Collective Responsibility (London, 1992). violence, structural: see structural violence. virtue, unity of. This doctrine is advanced by Plato, Aris- totle, and other ancient philosophers, although its correct interpretation has been the subject of much scholarly debate. Understood as the claim that having one virtue entails having them all, it is defended in many recent for- mulations of virtue ethics. The following line of thought seems to support the doc- trine: the proper scope of each virtue is determined collect- ively by the others. We would not describe someone’s action, motivated by the desire to spare x’s feelings, as ‘kind’ if it involved his knowingly being unfair to y. Against this, opponents claim that one can, without con- tradiction, describe a villain as brave. And do we not observe, in different individuals, that people may excel in some virtues while lacking others? While the doctrine appears to require empirical confir- mation, its defenders typically appeal to conceptual con- straints, such as the claim that virtue must issue in right conduct. s.d.r. Philippa Foot, ‘Virtues and Vices’, reprinted in her Virtues and Vices (Oxford, 1978, 2002). John McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’, reprinted in his Mind, Value and Reality (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). virtue epistemology. Virtue epistemologists attempt to apply to epistemology the insights of virtue ethics. Virtue epistemologists do not say that a justified belief is one suit- ably related to something foundational, or one that is a member of a coherent set; they say that it is one that a virtuous cognizer, someone with the cognitive virtues, would have. They tend then to give a complex picture of cognitive virtues; the virtues of the rational enquirer need not be restricted to (say) the ability to discover truths and avoid errors, but are many and various, perhaps including such traits as imaginativeness, a sense of the absurd, and some blend of epistemic stubbornness and modesty. j.d. G. Axtell (ed.), Knowledge, Belief and Character: Readings in Virtue Epistemology (Oxford, 2000). virtues. Almost all systematic approaches to ethics have something to say about what traits count as virtues and about the character of virtue as a whole. A distinction is typically made between intellectual and moral/ethical virtues, but there is an important difference also between those traditions of moral theory that highlight and focus on virtue—which can be classed together under the title ‘virtue ethics’—and approaches to ethics that make room for an account of virtue(s) only alongside, and by way of supplementing, the main business of formulating the ultimate principles or rules of morality. For the latter, virtues and virtue are effectively the internal analogue of (a set of) moral principles—they amount to dispositions to obey or follow what the rules prescribe (as, mainly, with *Kantianism) or else (as with direct *utilitarianism) to dispositions whose existence furthers the same goals as are specified in principles of right action. By contrast, various forms of virtue ethics play down the importance or even deny the existence of generally valid moral rules or principles, and claim that morality is most fundamentally to be understood in terms of inner traits, virtues, that cannot be cashed out in terms of rules or goals. Aristotelian virtue ethics regards matters of right and wrong as unencapsulable in rules, and describes the virtuous individual as someone who perceives and fairly effortlessly acts upon situationally unique moral require- ments. And philosophers such as Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, John McDowell, Martha Nussbaum, Amélie Rorty, Michael Stocker, and Michael Slote have sought to develop versions or aspects of *Aristotelianism that are sensitive to the current situ- ation in ethical theory. Other forms of virtue ethics— arguably those defended, for example, by Plato and James Martineau (a nineteenth-century British ethicist)—think of the virtuous agent not as perceiving what is independ- ently right or noble to do, but as having independently admirable motives or other inner states whose very expression in her actions serves to make those actions right or admirable. For Plato, virtue is an inner state, is the har- mony, health, beauty, or strength of a soul made up of interacting parts or aspects, and right or just action is action that sustains or enhances inner virtue. Such a view treats the morality of actions as derivative from the moral- ity or ethics of agents’ inner states (in a way that Aristotle’s theory of situationally perceived right or noble actions arguably does not), and one also finds such ‘agent-basing’ in Martineau’s view, according to which there is an intu- itive hierarchy of moral motives (reverence, followed by compassion, being at the top) and the rightness of actions depends on which of possibly conflicting motives deter- mines one’s actions. More recently, Michael Slote and Jorge Gracia have, respectively, begun to explore updated versions of Plato’s inner-strength approach and Mar- tineau’s intuitive hierarchy. Let us turn now to the discussion of particular virtues, which has varied over the centuries in a number of import- ant ways. Ancient (virtue) ethics recognized four cardinal ethical virtues: temperance, justice, courage, and (prac- tical) wisdom, but in the Middle Ages Christian philoso- phers tended to add three theological virtues: faith, hope, virtues 947 and charity or love, to the list of major virtues. In the ethics of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, a thesis of the unity of the virtues emerged as a pivotal doctrine, the idea being (very roughly) that each virtue requires that one be sensitive to potentially inconsistent claims deriving from the other virtues, so that in the end one cannot really possess one virtue without possessing them all. However, this doc- trine is not widely accepted by those who have treated the virtues during the modern period. What is accepted and goes back to ancient times is the idea of virtues as dispos- itions, rather than skills or capacities. Someone who is able to control his appetites but in fact does not cannot be regarded as having the virtue of temperance or moder- ation. But there has, over the millennia, been strong dis- agreement about whether it is more virtuous and admirable to overcome strong temptations or to lack such temptations altogether. And in discussions of virtue(s) there has also been much disagreement over whether conscientious adherence to duty is morally preferable to ‘natural’ motivations like compassion or love as a basis for actions (Kant gives preference to the motive of con- scientiousness and even says that other motives have no moral value, but in recent years a whole host of phil- osophers, including Philippa Foot, Michael Stocker, Lawrence Blum, and Bernard Williams, have opposed this view). In recent years, the whole topic of virtue and the virtues has been of increasing interest to moral philosophers, and there are more and more philosophers who think a focus on virtue can form the basis for an entire free-standing account of morality and ethics. m.s. R. Crisp (ed.), How Should One Live? Essays on the Virtues (Oxford, 1996). —— and M. Slote (eds.), Virtue Ethics (Oxford, 1997). P. Foot, Virtues and Vices (Berkeley, Calif., 1978). R. Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford, 2000). A. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (Berkeley, Calif., 1980). M. Slote, From Morality to Virtue (Oxford, 1992). virtues, doxastic. Breaking down traditional barriers between epistemology and ethics, some philosophers stress the central roles of virtue and character in the eval- uation of our doxastic life (believing, doubting, etc.). An assumption is made that doxastic states are voluntary in at least a weak sense. A person of virtuous doxastic character habitually avoids the vices of *scepticism and dogmatism while exhibiting such virtues as intellectual impartiality and courage. The doxastic states (e.g. beliefs) of such a balanced personality come about through a process that is responsible in a sense of ‘responsible’ similar to its sense when we speak of a father’s parenting as responsible. p.h.h. *voluntarism, doxastic. Jonathan L. Kvanvig, The Intellectual Virtues and the Life of the Mind: On the Place of the Virtues in Contemporary Epistemology (Savage, Md., 1992). virtues, intellectual. The intellectual, or epistemic, *virtues are those character traits of an agent that are conducive to the agent forming true beliefs and, thereby, gaining *knowledge. The character traits of being open- minded or conscientious could thus be regarded as intel- lectual virtues (though perhaps not exclusively: they may also be thought to be moral virtues). Although discussion of the intellectual virtues has always been a part of episte- mology, in recent years it has come to the fore with the development of so-called virtue epistemologies, where the intellectual virtues take centre stage. For example, Linda Zagzebski offers a broadly Aristotelian account of the intellectual virtues which presents an integrated account of the moral and intellectual virtues in terms of the kind of character that an agent needs if she is to lead the good life. This is in contrast to the type of *reliabilism proposed by Ernest Sosa, who argues that an intellectual virtue might merely be a reliable cognitive faculty of the agent, such as the faculty of sight, and thus need not be part of the agent’s intellectual character at all. d.pri. E. Sosa, ‘Knowledge and Intellectual Virtue’, Monist, 68 (1985). L. Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (Cambridge, 1996). virtuous circle. Particular deductions must conform to general logical principles; but such principles must con- form to accepted deductive practice. For Goodman, this circularity is virtuous and means only that our principles and practices should be brought into agreement. But if this involves the amendment of both principle and practice, it is not clear that what we have here is properly speaking a circle at all. m.c. *vicious circle. N. Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (London, 1957). viscous: see slime. vitalism. The idea that life cannot be explained in material terms stems from Aristotle, but life as a potent explan- atory and evaluative concept rose to importance in the late nineteenth century in reaction to scientific *materialism and Kantian *idealism. It appealed, among others, to Berg- son, Nietzsche, and Dilthey. While vitalists differ in detail, they share some general beliefs: Life, and reality in so far as it is living, consists in movement and becoming, rather than in static being. Reality is organic, not mechanical: biology, and often history, are more central than physics. Life is known empirically or by intuition, rather than by concepts and logical inference. Life is objective and tran- scends the knowing subject. Vitalism stresses the diversity of life and tends towards pluralism, and occasionally rela- tivism, rather than monism. It is not sharply distinct from philosophical *anthropology. m.j.i. H. Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933 (Cambridge, 1984). 948 virtues Vitoria, Francisco de (1480–1546). A member of the Dominican Order, he was a student at Paris, and later lec- tured at Salamanca. He wrote lengthy commentaries on theological writings of Thomas Aquinas but is most famous for his political and legal writings, and especially for his contribution to international law. He believed in jus gentium, a ‘law of nations’ established on the basis of natural law and universally valid. Living at the time of the conquest of the Americas, Vitoria developed his teaching partly in the context of his discussions on the appropriate treatment of the native peoples of the New World. a.bro. B. Hamilton, Political Thought in Sixteenth Century Spain (Oxford, 1963). Vlastos, Gregory (1907–91). Professor of Philosophy at Princeton and at Berkeley. Vlastos brought to the under- standing of Greek philosophers, above all Socrates and Plato, an unsurpassed combination of flair and rigour, both philosophical and philological. He also propounded a radical doctrine of *equality: people vary in ‘merit’, but each has the same ‘individual human worth’ and *justice requires that people be treated in accordance with their identical human worth, not in accordance with their vari- ous merits. This egalitarianism has been more admired than followed. n.c.d. Gregory Vlastos, ‘Justice and Equality’, in Richard Brandt (ed.), Social Justice (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1962). ——Platonic Studies (Princeton, NJ, 1981). ——Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cambridge, 1991). void. This word (Greek kenon, Latin vacuum) was a term of art in ancient philosophy of nature, used to designate utterly empty space or extension. Some philosophers (notably Aristotle, perhaps also Plato) rejected the notion as incoherent. Others (the Stoics) gave it a marginal role in ontology; it enabled them to posit a limited universe, for which the external void supplied a defining condition. But for the fifth-century Atomists and the Epicureans it was a key component in ontology. They used the idea to under- pin the possibility of a universe which contains many objects undergoing change: void effected the separation of one object from another, and the distinctness of an actual state of affairs from its non-existent successor. The explanatory adequacy of this ontology was also used, par- ticularly by the Epicureans, to bring out the ethical impli- cations of their materialism. Since the only alternative to an existing object was empty space, the option of survival in the form of an incorporeal *soul was excluded. j.d.g.e. *atomism; Epicureanism. For a thorough and penetrating survey of the void and related notions in ancient philosophy of nature, see R. R. K. Sorabji, Time, Creation and the Continuum (London, 1983). Voidism: see Buddhist philosophy; Na¯ga¯rjuna. volition. The faculty of the *will; or an item (sometimes alternatively called an act of will) conceived as the product of such a faculty. In many dualist and empiricist accounts of *action, volitions are mental items that cause bodily motions on occasions of human agency. Ryle criticized such accounts. In recent philosophy, volitions are introduced in various roles, sometimes as a species of *intention. It remains con- troversial exactly what Ryle’s arguments rule out, and whether volitions can or ought to play any role in expli- cating *agency. j.horn. *trying. Jennifer Hornsby, Actions (London, 1980), ch. 4. R. Kane (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (Oxford, 2001). Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de (1694–1778). Though not an original thinker, Voltaire was in his time a major playwright and novelist, and a brilliant scientific and philosophical popularizer. After exile in England, Voltaire communicated Locke’s philosophy and Newton’s science through his Lettres philosophiques (1734). With strong and lifelong social concerns, Voltaire used the letters to praise what he portrayed as English constitutionalism and freedom of thought, and so criticize their lack in France. Voltaire controversially shared Locke’s agnosticism about the immateriality of mind. He believed that God’s exist- ence could be proved by the *cosmological and *design arguments. However, he was hostile to Leibniz’s theod- icy, and denied any particular providence. A believer in natural religion, Voltaire condemned the social effects of revealed religion as pernicious. He campaigned energet- ically for freedom of religion and judicial reform. t.p. F M. de Voltaire, Philosophical Letters on the English Nation (Indianapolis, 1961). voluntariness: see compatibilism and incompatibilism; embraced and reluctant desires; freedom; spontaneity and indifference; voluntarism, doxastic. voluntarism, doxastic. The question whether doxastic states (e.g. beliefs) are voluntary is important because such voluntariness seems to be assumed by any ethics of belief or theory of doxastic virtue. Doxastic voluntarists from René Descartes to Roderick M. Chisholm have held that believing is a voluntary act. Opponents from David Hume to Bernard Williams have argued that it makes no sense to speak of deciding to believe—the concept of vol- untary belief is simply incoherent. A plausible form of dox- astic voluntarism is developed by conceding that *beliefs cannot be voluntary acts because they are not acts at all, while insisting that genuine acts of assent and other of the myriad acts involved in acquiring, sustaining, and remov- ing doxastic states are often voluntary in a sense robust enough to justify holding a person responsible for being in such states. p.h.h. *virtues, doxastic. Peter Kauber, ‘Does James’ Ethics of Belief Rest on a Mistake?’, Southern Journal of Philosophy (1974). voluntarism, doxastic 949 . usage of the best ancient Latin V authors. Highly critical of the philosophical theology of medieval thinkers such as Aquinas, he wanted to return to the rhetorical theology of the Church Fathers empirical adequacy is the only aim of scientific theorizing. The belief that the theory fits the observable phenomena is the only belief involved in accepting a scientific theory; explanatory power is not grounds. heterodox views like atheism, and respond to the problem of evil, naturalism, no-self theories, etc. They seek to establish God as the material and efficient cause of the cosmos, they analyse dreaming,