voluntarism, ethical. Voluntarism can be characterized as any philosophical view in which prominence is given to the *will over against one’s other mental faculties. Ethical voluntarism is the view that whether an act qualifies as right or wrong depends primarily upon how the act is willed and that the consequences of one’s act are judged good or bad primarily in accord with the goodness or bad- ness of the will which produces the act. In general, Kantian ethics is quite hospitable to ethical voluntarism. Ethical voluntarists are inclined to doubt that there is such a thing as moral luck, since fortuitous circumstances are unre- lated to whether one’s will is good and hence to whether one can be judged as having done right or wrong. g.f.m. D. Statman, Moral Luck (New York, 1993). von Hartmann, Eduard: see Hartmann, Eduard von. von Neumann, John: see Neumann, John von. von Wright, Georg Henrik (1916–2003). In 1939, G. H. von Wright, a member of Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority, went from Helsinki to Cambridge to pursue his interest in induction and probability. He met Ludwig Wittgenstein, who influenced him greatly, and in 1948, at the age of 33, von Wright succeeded Wittgenstein as Pro- fessor of Philosophy at Cambridge University. He resigned the chair in 1951 to return to Finland. From 1961 to 1986 he was Research Professor at the Academy of Fin- land. Besides editing many of Wittgenstein’s works, he produced biographical, expository, and critical writings about Wittgenstein. A survey of the three volumes of his Philosophical Papers indicates the scope of his interests: Practical Reason (vol. i, 1983) continues themes from The Varieties of Goodness (1963), Norm and Action (1963), An Essay in Deontic Logic (1968), and Explanation and Under- standing (1971). Philosophical Logic (vol. ii, 1983) continues themes from A Treatise on Induction and Probability (1951) and Logical Studies (1957) and includes essays on para- doxes, preference, and tense logic. Truth, Knowledge, and Modality (vol. iii, 1984) continues themes from Causality and Determinism (1974) and Freedom and Determination (1980) and includes essays on propositions, causal know- ledge, and modality. d.h.s. P. A. Schilpp and L. E. Hahn (eds.), The Philosophy of Georg Henrik von Wright, The Library of Living Philosophers, xix (La Salle, Ill., 1989). Vorstellung. German for ‘putting forward’, hence ‘repre- sentation’ or ‘idea’ as used by British Empiricists. Like ‘idea’, Vorstellung has a narrow and a wide sense. (1) It is a mental *image, picture, or conception produced by prior perception of an object or objects. It contrasts with ‘sensa- tion’, ‘intuition’, and ‘perception’, since these require the actual presence of an object, and also with ‘thought’, ‘con- cept’, and ‘idea (Idee)’, since these need no pictorial com- ponent and are more objective than Vorstellungen. (One speaks of my Vorstellung (*idea, conception) of God, but the *concept (Begriff ) of God.) Vorstellungen are involved in memory, imagination, etc., and are, in the view of older psychologists, subject to laws of ‘association’. (2) In a wide sense, a Vorstellung is any mental item that refers to an intentional object. Hence a thought, a concept, or a per- ception is also a Vorstellung. Some idealists argued that we cannot know objects in themselves, but only ‘the Vorstellungen that they produce in us when they affect our senses’ (Kant), or that ‘the world is my Vorstellung’ (Schopenhauer). Hegel’s *ideal- ism depends on thought, the ‘concept’, and the Idee, rather than Vorstellungen. In his view, religion presents in Vorstel- lungen (in the narrow sense of ‘pictorial imagery’) the ‘con- tent’ that art presents in sensory intuitions (Anschauungen) and philosophy in thoughts. m.j.i. M. Clark, Logic and System: A Study of the Transition from ‘Vorstel- lung’ to Thought in the Philosophy of Hegel (The Hague, 1971). W. A. de Vries, Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity: An Introduction to Theoretical Spirit (Ithaca, NY, 1988). C. Knüfer, Grundzüge der Geschichte des Begriffs ‘Vorstellung’ von Wolff bis Kant (Halle, 1911). voting paradox. Suppose that three people, Alice, Brian, and Cait, are choosing between three candidates, Primus, Secunda, and Tertius, for a job. Alice prefers Primus to Secunda to Tertius. Brian prefers Secunda to Tertius to Primus. Cait prefers Tertius to Primus to Secunda. So a majority prefer Primus to Secunda, and a majority prefer Secunda to Tertius, and, paradoxically, a majority prefer Tertius to Primus. So preferences obtained by majority voting between pairs do not give a coherent ranking. Or, to put it differently, the outcome depends on the order in which the options are presented. If the first choice is between Primus and Secunda then Secunda will be elimin- ated and Primus will win when compared with Tertius. But if the first choice is between Primus and Tertius then Primus will be eliminated and then Secundus will win when compared with Tertius. These facts are special cases of Arrow’s theorem, which shows that there can be no perfect voting system. a.m. *democracy; Arrow’s paradox. Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values, 2nd edn. (1963). Michael Dummett, Voting Procedures (Oxford, 1984). Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich (1896–1934). Innovative Russian psychologist and philosopher who argued that only by understanding the role of culture in psychological development can we attain an account of consciousness that overcomes the shortcomings of *behaviourism and *reductionism without embracing *dualism. While human beings are endowed with elementary mental func- tions that can be explained naturalistically, the higher mental functions are mediated by psychological tools, such as language and other externalized systems of repre- sentation, which the individual acquires, not naturally, but through the internalization of social activity. Each 950 voluntarism, ethical child therefore attains consciousness as she is inaugurated into human culture. Shortly after Vygotsky’s death from tuberculosis in 1934, the Stalin regime blacklisted his works for many years, but his ideas were preserved by his collaborators, especially A. R. Luria and A. N. Leontiev, and formed the foundation of Soviet ‘socio-historical psychology’. His thought has also been influentual in the West, particularly among educationalists. d.bak. David Bakhurst, Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy (Cambridge, 1991), ch. 3. L. S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich 951 Walton, Kendall (1939– ). American philosopher. Wal- ton’s work in philosophical aesthetics makes him one of the most influential thinkers in that field since Monroe Beardsley and Nelson Goodman. One of Walton’s early contributions (1970) was to show that the aesthetic properties of works of art were not intrinsic to them, but were instead relative to the medium, style, and genre cat- egories in which those works were correctly perceived, and thus that, as a consequence, strong versions of formalism and anti-intentionalism regarding works of art must be mistaken. Walton’s major contribution to aes- thetics, however (1990), consists in his elaboration of a general theory of representations or fictions, which are treated as equivalent, in terms of an activity of prop- guided imagination, or ‘make-believe’. In subsequent important papers Walton has addressed issues concerning the aesthetics of photography, the aesthetics of music, the embedding of moral perspectives in literature, and the role of simulation in aesthetic appreciation. j.lev. Kendall Walton, ‘Categories of Art’, Philosophical Review (1970). —— Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). Walzer, Michael (1935– ). American political philosopher who has specialized in the study of democracy, justice, and ethical relativism. He is particularly interested in the processes through which each community arrives at its own shared understanding of justice and the good society. Walzer believes that these processes and understandings are necessarily community-specific, and hence a certain degree of cultural relativism must be respected. However, Walzer also recognizes a non-relativist ‘minimal code’, prohibiting slavery, genocide, and gross cruelty in any community. His most important works include Just and Unjust Wars (1977), Spheres of Justice (1983), and Interpret- ation and Social Criticism (1987). Walzer has been variously described as a liberal, a communitarian, and a radical democrat, but the originality of his thought makes him difficult to label. Walzer is currently a professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. w.k. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equal- ity (Oxford, 1983). Wang, Hao (1921–95). American mathematical logician and philosopher of mathematics, born and educated in China. He supplied the axioms of membership for Quine’s *set theory in Mathematical Logic, replacing an earlier inconsistent version. He extended Russell’s ramified type hierarchy to infinite levels. He was the first to write (in 1959) a computer program which efficiently proved all the first-order theorems of Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica. His contributions to mathematical philoso- phy often took the form of historical analyses of major fig- ures; his reports of his discussions with Gödel in the 1970s are a main source for Gödel’s unpublished philosophical views on truth and the nature of mathematics. Wang argued that philosophers of mathematics should take mathematical knowledge and intuition as given, and seek to describe their structure and their place in life. w.a.h. Hao Wang, Beyond Analytic Philosophy: Doing Justice to what we Know (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). —— A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1996). Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529). Confucian thinker in China, also known as Wang Shou-jen. His thinking partly drew inspiration from that of Lu Hsiang-shan (1139–93), and scholars speak of a Lu–Wang school which competed for influence with the Ch’eng–Chu school of Ch’eng I (1033–1107) and Chu Hsi (1130–1200). Wang’s fundamen- tal ideas are contained in the work Ch’uan-hsi-lu (Instruc- tions for Practical Living). Though sharing Chu Hsi’s view that human beings already have a fully virtuous dispos- ition which has been obscured by distortive desires and thoughts, he opposed Chu on various issues. For example, for Wang, self-cultivation should involve one’s directing attention to the mind, constantly watching out for and eliminating distortive desires and thoughts, rather than engaging in such inquiries as the study of classics and his- torical records. k l.s. *Confucianism. Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings by Wang Yang-ming, tr. Wing-tsit Chan (New York, 1963). war, just. The tradition of ‘just war’ theory has aimed at identifying those conditions which make it morally legit- imate to wage war. It was developed originally by the Christian Church, and more recently has been expressed in the conventions of international law. The early W Christian attitude of abstention from involvement in war was difficult to sustain when Christianity became the established religion of the Roman Empire, and thinkers such as Augustine turned to the idea that the waging of war was a legitimate exercise of the authority of rulers. As the ruler may justly punish wrongdoing on the part of his subjects, so likewise war could be ‘just’ if it was waged to punish external wrongdoers. Over the centuries this position was elaborated in detail, and divided into the theory of jus ad bellum—what makes it right to go to war—and the theory of jus in bello— what it is right to do in war. Typical conditions laid down for jus ad bellum were that war may be undertaken only by a legitimate authority, it may be waged only for a just cause, it must be a last resort, there must be a formal dec- laration of war, and there must be a reasonable hope of success. The two most important conditions for jus in bello were that the means employed should be ‘proportional’ to the end aimed at (that is, the war should not be fought in such a way as to constitute a greater evil than the evil it was intended to remedy), and that it was not permissible to kill ‘the innocent’ (understood to mean non- combatants, civilians). More recent versions of ‘just war’ theory have focused especially on two ideas: (i) that war can be justified only as a response to aggression (this is presented as the principal condition for jus ad bellum); and (ii) the idea of non- combatant immunity as the principal condition for jus in bello. The difficulty with both ideas is their dependence on an analogy between individuals and communities. The right to resist aggression is standardly compared to individuals’ right of self-defence. However, even if it is permissible for an individual to kill his attacker in order to defend his own life, is it equally justifiable to kill thousands of people in order to defend the borders of a nation? It can be argued that individuals have a right of self-defence because the attacker has forfeited his own right to life by threatening someone else’s life. It does not follow, however, that the inhabitants of a country, or even its military personnel, have forfeited their right to life because their country’s rulers have decided upon aggression against another country. The application of the principle of non-combatant immunity raises similar problems. Even if a nation waging war is not ‘innocent’, most of the individual com- batants would seem to be, in any morally relevant sense, just as ‘innocent’ as non-combatants. They are not responsible for the war. They may have been compelled to fight, and if civilians are in an appropriate sense ‘inno- cent’, then most individual combatants would seem to be no less so. Moreover, the nature of modern societies and the immensely destructive power of modern weapons makes it very difficult in practice to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. In most mod- ern wars it is virtually impossible to target a country’s mili- tary forces and military installations without attacking centres of population and killing large numbers of civilians. In that case no modern war can be waged with- out killing the innocent. Perhaps we should conclude that no war can be ‘just’. r.j.n. *international relations, philosophy of; violence, political. Robert L. Holmes, On War and Morality (Princeton, NJ, 1989). David Rodin, War and Self-Defence (Oxford, 2003). Jenny Teichman, Pacifism and the Just War (Oxford, 1986). Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (Harmondsworth, 1977). war and philosophy. Philosophers of every era have tried to understand the nature and problems of war—from Heraclitus’ conception of war as the father of all things to Kant’s treatise on eternal peace. Philosophers have debated the value of war as a school for virtue, the misery of war, the causes of war, the *just war, and the possibility of creating peace and universal brotherhood. But war has been important to philosophy in other ways too. The dis- astrous Peloponnesian War certainly influenced Plato’s bad opinion of Athenian democracy. The capture of Rome by Alaric made St Augustine write Civitas Dei. Montaigne’s scepticism was strengthened by the religious wars of the sixteenth century. The Civil War of seven- teenth-century England gave Hobbes the problematic of Leviathan. In modern times too, war has influenced philosophy, sometimes in unexpected ways. Some illustrations of this can be drawn from the First World War. In quite a new way the First World War made scholars and scientists par- ticipate in the war of propaganda. The role of the philoso- phers was important. They contributed grand metaphysical interpretations of the war aims of their own nations. In Germany philosophers like Paul Natorp, Max Scheler, and George Simmel, to name a few, did their bit for the Vaterland. The war was depicted as a struggle between profound German ‘culture’ and shallow Anglo- French ‘civilization’. The value of war as existential experi- ence was stressed. All the German philosophical heritage was mobilized for the fight. ‘Send Fichte to the trenches!’ became a catchword. The French philosophers were not to be outdone. In his La Signification de la guerre (1915; tr. into English the same year) Henri Bergson explained that the war was one between ‘life and matter’. It takes no deep knowledge of the philosophy of Bergson to guess which among the combatants in the war represented ‘life’ and which represented ‘matter’. Those French historians of philosophy who had taken Fichte or Hegel as their subject had an unpleasant choice before them. Should they sacri- fice thinkers, whom formerly they had venerated, on the altar of patriotism? Or should they try to make a distinc- tion between the old good Germany and the new bad one? Nor did the philosophical struggle in Great Britain escape the bitterness of war. Until its outbreak *Hegelian- ism had been firmly entrenched in the universities of Eng- land and Scotland. Now everything emanating from the enemy was seen as highly suspect. One victim of this wave of hatred against all things German was the philosopher- statesman R. B. Haldane. Haldane was a Hegelian philoso- pher and a follower of T. H. Green. He was also a liberal war and philosophy 953 politician. When the war broke out Haldane was Lord Chancellor in Asquith’s Cabinet. In 1916 he was forced to resign. A hue and cry had been raised against this states- man who had once said that Germany was his ‘spiritual home’. Wartime animosity against German philosophy is exemplified in another way by L. T. Hobhouse in his The Metaphysical Theory of the State (1918). The book is a critique of Bernard Bosanquet’s Hegelian political philos- ophy. In his preface Hobhouse dedicated it to his son, who was fighting in the trenches against the very enemy whom his father tried to overcome with philosophical argu- ments—the German spirit. Of course there were other, more subtle ways in which the war influenced philosophy. One of the most import- ant works of twentieth-century philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was pre- pared and written while its author was an active combat- ant or a prisoner of war. Does not the agonized tone of this strange and remarkable work bear some relation to that biographical background? The First World War had the effect of making philoso- phy more national and the differences between national traditions in philosophy more important. The Second World War and the ensuing Cold War had similar conse- quences, national and ideological cleavages parting philosophers and other scholars from each other. Philo- sophical arguments had their share in the wars of propa- ganda. World congresses of philosophy were held and other efforts made to bring philosophers together in amic- able discussions. But there was great difficulty in finding a way back even to the climate of discussion of the nineteenth century. The Stoic utopia of a peaceful world state of philosophers seems very distant. s.n. Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston, Mass., 1989). Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979). Warnock, Geoffrey J. (1923–96). Warnock’s first major publication was a monograph on Berkeley (Berkeley (Har- mondsworth, 1953) ) in which he brought some of the tools of modern ‘linguistic philosophy’ to bear on Berkeley’s ideas, to considerable effect. The bulk of his subsequent work concentrated on moral philosophy, including an inci- sive critique of developments in that subject this century (Contemporary Moral Philosophy (London, 1967) ), and an exposition of his own developed theory (The Object of Moral- ity (London, 1971) ). Warnock takes a broadly naturalistic approach to the phenomenon of morality, arguing that it exists to help regulate conflict and promote social stability. He was the husband of Mary Warnock, and spent his work- ing life in Oxford, where he was Vice-Chancellor from 1981 to 1985. He was knighted in 1986. n.j.h.d. *Berkeley. Warnock, Mary (1924– ). Baroness Warnock has done notable work in at least four fields: academic philosophy (narrowly conceived); the theory and practice of educa- tion; the morality and legality of new methods of embryo fertilization; public service associated with these concerns. In academic philosophy, she has written extensively on ethics, and particularly existentialist ethics. Other work has been in the philosophy of mind, with monographs entitled Imagination (London, 1976) and Memory (London, 1987). She chaired a government inquiry into special educational needs, in the mid-1970s, and has written widely on educa- tional issues, at both school and university level. She add- itionally chaired the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation in the early 1980s. Much of her working life was spent in Oxford, as college tutor but also Headmistress of Oxford High School. She was Mistress of Girton Col- lege, Cambridge, 1985–91. She was created a life peer in 1985 and was married to Geoffrey Warnock. n.j.h.d. *bioethics; moral sense. M. Warnock, Making Babies: Is There a Right to Have Children? (Oxford, 2003). war of all against all: see state of nature. Watson, John Broadus (1878–1958). An American psy- chologist, Watson was the father of *behaviourism, the dominant theory of psychology through most of the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. For Watson, if psychology is to be scientific, its data must consist of external (public) stimuli and external (behavioural) responses; and not introspective (private mental) reports. Introspective reports give psychologists only indirect access to whatever data they need to develop their sci- ence. In contrast, behavioural reports give psychologists access to data that are as direct as those found in the phys- ical sciences. As a method for how the science of psych- ology should proceed, Watson’s (as well as Clark Hull’s and B. F. Skinner’s) behaviourism should be distinguished from logical or conceptual behaviourism, which argues that the meaning of mental terms is wholly or primarily analysable behaviourally and/or dispositionally. n.f. John Broadus Watson, Behaviourism (London, 1925). Watsuji Tetsuro¯ (1889–1960). A prominent philosopher associated with the Kyoto School, Watsuji proposed the East Asian idea of ningen—‘human-beings-in- relationship’—as the basis for a philosophical anthropology. Torn in his youth between attractions to philosophy and literature, Watsuji produced early works on Schopen- hauer, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, before turning to a study of Asian traditions of thought. A polymath like many of his colleagues, he continued to write on such top- ics as Homer, Greek politics, and early Christianity, but devoted most of his energies to writings on Buddhism and the cultural history of Japan, with special emphasis on eth- ical thought. In his works on cultural anthropology—of which Climate (1935) has been translated into English— Watsuji criticized Heidegger for neglecting human spa- tiality in Being and Time and for making his notion of Dasein overly individualistic. g.r.p. 954 war and philosophy *Japanese philosophy. Watsuji Tetsuro¯, Climate: A Philosophical Study, tr. Geoffrey Bownas (Tokyo, 1961). weakness of will: see akrasia. Weber, Karl Emil Maximilian (Max) (1864–1920). German sociologist, whose polymathy defied his characterization of our age as one of specialization and bureaucracy. Men attach meanings to their actions and these become embod- ied in social norms. Hence sociology involves ‘understand- ing’ (Verstehen). But it can causally explain social phenomena by the comparative method and by ‘ideal types’. Ideal types include the three types of authority: trad- itional, charismatic, and legal-rational or bureaucratic (which prevails in both *capitalism and *socialism). Social phenomena, e.g. the rise of capitalism, depend not only on economic factors but on ideas, e.g. Calvinism’s ‘Protestant ethic’. Status groups are as important as Marx’s economic classes. In response to the political upheavals of 1919 he dis- tinguished the ‘ethic of responsibility’ from the ‘ethic of conscience’ and quoted Goethe’s Faust: ‘The devil is old; you must become old to understand him’. m.j.i. R. Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (London, 1960). Weil, Simone (1909–43). A pupil of the radical individual- ist philosopher Alain, Simone Weil evolved a Platonic interpretation of the world with strong mystical leanings. Her ideals, which first lay in the direction of anarcho- syndicalism, she pursued with a consistent eccentricity. After her conversion to Christianity, she combined her strong commitment to many of its Catholic forms with a thoroughgoing interpretation of its main themes—God, creation, redemption—through the concepts of ancient Greek philosophy. This involved an emphasis on the impersonal and the contemplative. Always a political activist, she also attempted to sketch the politics of a soci- ety equal to these aspirations. As such she represents the most striking example of twentieth-century Christian *Platonism. d.m cl. D. McLellan, Simone Weil: Utopian Pessimist (London, 1990). welfarism. A view which assigns to the state the function of looking after the well-being or welfare of the people. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries liberal- democratic theorists (such as Adam Smith) held that the state had a largely negative function of protecting security from outside or inside and only a minimal welfare func- tion, such as the provision of large works which individuals could not manage on their own or the ensuring of min- imum standards of education. Welfarism became a large function of the state in Britain after the Beveridge Report (1942), which propounded state responsibility for individ- ual welfare ‘from the cradle to the grave’. Other European states adopted the idea of welfarism to a greater or lesser extent. Indeed, Germany pioneered both modern social insurance in the 1880s and the concept of Wohfahrstaat in the 1920s. The USA has been much less influenced by these ideas. At the moment there seems to be a move away from welfarism in the UK and other parts of Europe, partly on the grounds that it is difficult to sustain the expenditure involved in such welfare concerns as the National Health Service, and partly on broader moral grounds, that wel- farism saps the moral fibre of the people and is really mas- sive state paternalism or, as it is often described by its opponents, that it constitutes the ‘nanny state’. r.s.d. *conservatism. R. Hattersley, Choose Freedom: The Future for Democratic Socialism (Harmondsworth, 1987). R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford, 1974). well-being. Variously interpreted as ‘living and faring well’ or ‘flourishing’, the notion of well-being is intricately bound up with our ideas about what constitutes human *happiness and the sort of life it is good to lead. Well-being is said to be both a condition of the good life and what the good life achieves. However, the phrase ‘the good life’ is ambiguous between the morally good life and the sort of life most people aspire to, a life in which comfort and enjoyment have a large part. Indeed we may even suspect that the two sorts of life are mutually exclusive—and that well- being belongs firmly in the latter, or would be a surprising central feature of the former. It seems that the ambiguity can at least be taken as an indication of how unclear we find the connection between being morally good and pos- sessing health, wealth, and happiness, and the other com- ponents of well-being. Some philosophers have, nevertheless, objected to the suggested dichotomy between what is morally good and what is enjoyable. Aristotle, for example, insists in his dis- cussion of *eudaemonia that the morally good life is essen- tial to human flourishing and, conversely, that being good is possible only for a person who has well-being. Thus, according to this view, well-being is a notion which spans both the moral and non-moral aspects of life. It follows that any adequate conception of a good life cannot be limited to either a narrowly moral, or a non-moral, account. It will be a highly complex account, akin to the answer a parent might give when asked ‘What sort of life do you wish for your children?’, with all the intricacies such an answer would involve. Furthermore, because a good person cannot enjoy well-being in conditions of poverty or oppression, it is clear that well-being is also a political notion. It must therefore be explicated in both moral and political terms, with the focus of interest placed firmly on the interdepend- ence of these. While common sense accords with this view of the matter, the notion of well-being has tended to be the subject of much dispute, and prey to the conflicting conceptions of what enables human beings to flourish which are provided by different moral and political philosophies. Nevertheless, it seems possible to specify, as Rawls and Honderich do, the primary goods which are necessary, if well-being 955 not sufficient, conditions of well-being, and the political arrangements which will therefore facilitate it. The ques- tion of the distribution of well-being will then be essen- tially a matter of social justice. Since it is hard to justify inequalities of well-being even when it seems possible to justify inequalities of socio-economic goods, the question will be best answered, perhaps, by some principle of equality which gives priority to policies whose end is to make well-off those who are badly off in terms of well-being. p.w. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. J. Griffin, Well-Being (Oxford, 1986). T. Honderich, ‘The Question of Well-Being and the Principle of Equality’, Mind (1981). J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). W. Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford, 1996). well-formed formula. A formal calculus has a basic vocabulary and rules for forming acceptable sequences (well-formed formulae or wffs) of that vocabulary. Well- formed formulae are analogues of grammatical sentences in natural language. The rules for well-formedness are analogues of rules of grammar. For example, for a version of the *propositional calculus where (1) ~ and ∨ are basic logical constants (‘not’, ‘or’), (2) A 1 , A 2 , . . ., A n , are atomic propositional expressions, the set of wffs is defined as follows: (3) wffs are either atomic propositional expressions or molecular, i.e. of the form ~ φ or (φ ∨ ψ), where (4) ~ φ is a wff if and only if φ is a wff, (5) (φ ∨ ψ) is a wff if and only if φ and ψ are wffs. (‘(’and ‘)’ are analogues of punctuation.) (1)–(5) provide a *decision procedure for well- formedness. r.b.m. B. Mates, Elementary Logic (Oxford, 1972). Weltanschauung. German for ‘world-view’, a general view of the universe and man’s place in it which affects one’s conduct. For Dilthey philosophies are world-views, and fall into three types: *materialism, pantheistic *vital- ism, *idealism. Husserl contrasted culturally and histor- ically relative world-views with ‘scientific’ philosophy. Scheler argued that we cannot avoid a world-view; but we should choose it reflectively and by a valid method. Jaspers investigated the roots of world-views in our sub- jective experience. m.j.i. M. Heidegger, ‘Anmerkungen zu Karl Jaspers Psychologie der Weltanschauungen’, in Wegmarken, 2nd edn. (Frankfurt, 1978). E. Husserl, Philosophy as a Rigorous Science (1910–11), in Phenom- enology and the Crisis of Science, tr. Q. Lauer (New York, 1965). Weyl’s paradox is a name that has been used for the para- dox concerning the term ‘heterological’, which is sup- posed to apply to all and only terms which do not apply truly to themselves. The problem is that it then seems that ‘heterological’ is heterological if and only if it is not. This paradox was originally presented in 1908 in a paper by Kurt Grelling and Leonard Nelson, so that the term ‘Weyl’s paradox’ is incorrect. Herman Weyl (1885–1955) was a German-American mathematician, physicist, and philosopher of science. j.c. *Grelling’s paradox. wff: see well-formed formula. Whewell, William (1794–1866). Influential Cambridge philosopher, mineralogist, and educational reformer. Son of a Lancaster carpenter, Whewell became Master of Trin- ity College in 1841. In his The Philosophy of the Inductive Sci- ences Founded upon their History (London, 1840) he sought to update the methodology advocated programmatically in Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, and to base this updat- ing on consideration of how science had actually pro- gressed—a consideration made possible by his own History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Time (London, 1837). He asserted a fundamental antith- esis between the facts studied by a scientist and the con- cepts that a scientist invents in order to colligate the facts, and owed to Kant the idea that certain very general laws are presuppositions of empirical inquiry. Correspond- ingly he opposed J. S. Mill’s views about the epistemology of such general laws. l.j.c. *natural law. M. Fisch, William Whewell: Philosopher of Science (Oxford, 1991). Whitehead, Alfred North (1861–1947). British math- ematician and philosopher who spent his later and philo- sophically most productive years in the United States at Harvard University, where he and his wife hosted legen- dary Sunday teas. Principia Mathematica (1910–13), his three-volume attempt in collaboration with his former student Bertrand Russell to show that mathematics can be reduced to logic (i.e. to establish *logicism), is considered by many to be one of the great intellectual achievements of all time. Process and Reality (1929), a metaphysical sys- tem in which substance (as traditionally conceived in Western philosophy) is rejected in favour of process, is regarded as having importance in the history of meta- physics comparable to the significance of his earlier work for logic and the foundations of mathematics. Whitehead’s work is usually divided into three periods: before 1914, mathematics and logic; 1914–24, philosophy of physical science; and 1924–47, metaphysics and the his- torical role of metaphysical ideas in civilization. Although during most of his life he considered himself and was con- sidered by others to be a mathematician, study of his intel- lectual development reveals it to be unified by philosophical concerns (e.g. ‘modes of togetherness’). In Science and the Modern World (1925), his first meta- physical work, Whitehead rejected the idea of ‘simple location’ presupposed by scientific materialism. Every- thing, he said, is a field spread out temporally and spatially; every object, from a human body to an electron, is 956 well-being will 957 composed of events or processes. In Process and Reality he systematically elaborated this metaphysics, in which the basic unit is an experiential event called an ‘actual entity’. An actual entity is a unifying of its relations to the other actual entities of the world it appropriates. These appro- priating relations are ‘prehensions’, vectors which trans- form everything experienced into that entity’s distinctive actuality. God plays a central role in this appropriating process. In his ‘Primordial Nature’ God orders possibilities (‘eternal objects’) to make them relevant to the becoming of an entity. In his ‘Consequent Nature’ God preserves the immediacies of all past actual entities and unites them with his envisionment of the primordial unity of all eternal objects. God is not only necessary to every becoming: becomings are necessary to the development of God as Consequent. Like any actual entity, God is a process of becoming. Whitehead’s books after Process and Reality avoid technicalities in exploring imaginatively the significance of his metaphysical ideas. Religion in the Making (1926) is a richly suggestive discussion of the nature of religion; Adventures of Ideas (1933) presents, for example, his con- ception of experience in luminous prose; and Modes of Thought (1938) is intended as ‘a free examination of some ultimate notions, as they occur naturally in daily life’. p.h.h. *process philosophy. George A. Lucas, ‘Outside the Camp: Recent Work on White- head’s Philosophy’, Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society (1985). Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (New York, 1941). why. The question ‘Why . . . ?’ is answered by explaining why, which is stating a reason why (explaining-what is dif- ferent). Often such reasons are causes, but even when ‘cause’ is not the natural description, ‘Because – – –’ is the natural formula for answering ‘why’ questions. Other idioms do exist, as in: ‘Why did she flood the bath- room?’—‘Out of mischief’; ‘Why do animals have hearts?’—‘For pumping the blood’; ‘Why walk?’—‘To save money’. But such answers can always be expanded into ‘Because – – –’ answers, usually becoming more informative in the process (the expansion will often indicate that the thing to be explained does some good, or—differently—aims at some good, these being two kinds of *teleological explanation). A ‘why’ explanation must, first, state a reason for think- ing that the matter to be explained is true: for example, ‘Bangkok is hot because it is in the tropics’. This may, sec- ondly, need amplification—different things go without saying in different contexts of ‘why’ inquiry. The amplifi- cation may fill the reason out, for example by adding that most tropical cities are hot, or strengthen it, for example by substituting ‘Because it is at sea-level in the tropics, and all sea-level tropical cities are hot’, or extend it, for example by explaining why sea-level tropical cities are hot (this last process is potentially endless). But thirdly, some ‘why’ questions do not need, or even cannot get, answers—for example, ‘Why is Bangkok a sea-level tropical city?’ Finally and crucially, many reasons for thinking fail to be reasons why even after these amplifications. For example— an example of Aristotle’s—‘Because they do not twinkle’ does not begin to explain why the planets are near us (here the explanation goes the other way round). The question what extra is required connects with the mysterious ques- tion what *causality is. c.a.k. *explanation; reasons and causes. P. T. Geach, Reason and Argument (Oxford, 1976), ch. 17. D H. Ruben, Explaining Explanation (London, 1990). Why be moral? see moral philosophy, history of. Wiggins, David (1933– ). Oxford philosopher specializing in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and ethics, noted for his work on *identity. He challenges P. T. Geach’s doc- trine of the relativity of identity, advancing instead an ‘absolute’ conception whereby if particulars are identical under one *sortal concept, then they are identical under any other that applies to them. Geach’s supposed counter- examples are dismissed as turning on equivocation. Thus Geach suggests that x and y might be the same river, but different bodies of water. Wiggins’s response is that rivers are not identical with bodies of water, but rather consti- tuted by them. One consequence of Wiggins’s position is that two dif- ferent *things—for instance, a river and the body of water currently constituting it—may exist in the same place at the same time. This may seem odd, but is unobjectionable provided, as here, the things in question are of different kinds. e.j.l. D. Wiggins, Needs, Values, Truth, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 1998). —— Sameness and Substance Renewed (Cambridge, 2003). will. Traditionally the will was taken to be a mental fac- ulty responsible for acts of volition such as choosing, deciding, and initiating motion. This faculty of the soul or mind was taken as one of the characteristics, the most important, separating us from animals and inanimate objects. Usually the will was explicitly taken to be capable of *origination—the creation of a new beginning and escape from the past. Kant stressed the moral importance of acts of will, as opposed to practical consequences of actions, but the will reached its philosophical apotheosis in Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea (1818, 1844). Contemporary philosophy of mind is less accepting of ontologically real mental faculties, although the will has continued to have attention paid to it. The traditional problem of the freedom of the will concerns itself partly with (a) the possible incompatibility between free will and determinism, and (b) the alleged dependency of moral responsibility upon free will. r.c.w. *freedom and determinism. A. Kenny, Will, Freedom, and Power (Oxford, 1975). Brian O’Shaughnessy, The Will (Cambridge, 1980). Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, 1949). William of Ockham: see Ockham. Williams, Bernard A. O. (1929–2003). Bernard Williams was one of the leading British intellectuals of the late twentieth century. Among philosophers he is best known for his work in moral philosophy and on the metaphysics of mind, especially in connection with issues of personal identity. He also made contributions to classical philoso- phy, notably Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, 1993), and wrote an important book on Descartes (Descartes (Harmondsworth, 1978) ), in which he gives prominence to the idea of there being an ‘absolute conception of reality’ inherent in Descartes’s philosophical project. Williams’s work on *personal identity resists easy sum- mary. In general, though, it is marked by a particular inven- tiveness in devising examples or possible cases to refute or to develop theses about the physical or mental bases of per- sonal identity, and by great fertility and incisiveness in see- ing new ways of approaching issues. This freshness in tackling problems is a notable feature of much of Williams’s work, which is widely influential. His papers on this topic are collected in Problems of the Self (Cambridge, 1973). In moral philosophy, Williams argued against both Kantian and utilitarian approaches. In both cases, he objects that these views require agents to view themselves unrealistically as simply one person among others, which neglects to acknowledge the special significance that a per- son’s own projects must have for them. In particular, he gives emphasis to the role of emotions in moral respon- siveness. Williams is also sceptical that many of the claims morality makes for itself (that it is universal, absolutely binding, and so on) can cogently be justified. Many of these themes are prominent in his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London, 1985). Williams chaired the government Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship in the late 1970s. He held professorships in London, Oxford, and Berkeley, Califor- nia, and was Provost of King’s College Cambridge from 1979 to 1987. Not long before his death he completed a long-awaited book on Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton, NJ, 2002). n.j.h.d. *moral luck; reasons, internal and external. Williamson, Timothy (1955– ). British logician and episte- mologist, currently Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. Williamson defends the epistemic theory of *vague- ness. Vague terms have borderline cases. Most philoso- phers assume that there is no fact of the matter about whether a vague term can truly be applied in a borderline case. Williamson, however, maintains that vague terms have sharp boundaries, which are in principle inaccessible, even though they are determined by the ways in which language is used. Since Williamson understands know- ledge in terms of margin of error principles, which require that p must be true in all cases sufficiently similar to cases in which p is known, it remains possible to apply vague terms knowledgeably. In more recent work Williamson has developed a broader epistemological perspective. Taking knowledge to be conceptually prior to belief, he offers new perspectives on the plausibility of scepticism, the nature of evidence, the accessibility of our own mental states, and the limits of knowledge. j.ber. T. Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford, 2000). will to believe. In his 1897 article entitled ‘The Will to Believe’, William James said that, under certain specified conditions, we have a right to let our passional nature decide which of two alternative hypotheses to adopt. These are that the matter cannot be settled on intellectual grounds, and that the choice between them is living (we find each credible), forced (we must act in the light of one or the other), and momentous (really important). Examples are the choice between theism and atheism or free will and determinism. t.l.s.s. *voluntarism, doxastic. William James, ‘The Will to Believe’, in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York, 1897). will to live: see Schopenhauer. will to power. Nietzsche’s formula for what he took to be the basic disposition manifested in all that transpires in human life, and in all other phenomena as well. Every- thing that happens in our lives and in the world of which we are a part, for Nietzsche, may be interpreted in terms of *power-relationships within and among configurations of forces the basic tendency of which is to assert themselves towards others in an expanding or expending and trans- forming manner. (See e.g. Beyond Good and Evil, sect. 36; and The Will to Power, sect. 1067.) r.s. Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London, 1983), ch. 4. Wilt Chamberlain argument. In what is his best-known argument from Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York, 1974), Robert Nozick asks us to imagine that we are in a society that has just distributed income according to some ideal pattern, possibly a pattern of *equality. We are to fur- ther imagine that in such a society someone with the tal- ents of Wilt Chamberlain offers to play basketball for us provided that he or she receives a small fraction of the pro- ceeds from every home game ticket that is sold. Suppose we agree to these terms, and a large number of people attend the home games to watch this super-talented player, thereby securing for him or her a sizeable income. Since such an income would surely upset the initial pat- tern of income distribution whatever that happened to be, Nozick contends that this illustrates how an ideal of *lib- erty upsets the patterns required by other political ideals, and hence calls for their rejection. j.p.s. *libertarianism; conservatism. 958 will Winch, P. G. (1926–97). A prominent Wittgensteinian, whose writings explore the implications of the claim that to understand a language is to understand a *form of life. His most influential work, The Idea of a Social Science, was highly critical of received empiricist anthropological and sociological conceptions of understanding human action. It stimulated extensive debate about the methodology of the social sciences. Subsequent writings on the under- standing of primitive societies were equally influential. Winch’s ethical writings are distinguished not only by their seriousness, but also by the concreteness of examples and the attention to the context of moral predicaments, as well as the texture of life in which they are embedded. p.m.s.h. *social science, philosophy of. P. G. Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London, 1958). —— Ethics and Action (London, 1972). ——Trying to Make Sense (Oxford, 1987). wisdom. A form of understanding that unites a reflective attitude and a practical concern. The aim of the attitude is to understand the fundamental nature of reality and its sig- nificance for living a good life. The object of the practical concern is to form a reasonable conception of a good life, given the agents’ character and circumstances, and to evalu- ate the situations in which they have to make decisions and act from its point of view. These evaluations are often diffi- cult because many situations are complex, conceptions of a good life are incompletely formed, and the variability of individual character and circumstances render general principles insufficiently specific. Wisdom may be identi- fied then with good judgement about the evaluation of complex situations and conceptions of a good life in the light of a reflective understanding of the human condition. Although wisdom is what *philosophy is meant to be a love of, little attention has been paid to this essential com- ponent of good lives in post-classical Western philosophy. It is perhaps for this reason that those in search of it often turn to the obscurities of oriental religions for enlightenment. j.kek. *understanding. B. Blanshard, Reason and Goodness (London, 1961). J. Kekes, Wisdom and Good Lives: The Virtue of Reflection (Ithaca, NY, 1995). Wisdom, John (1904–93). Professor of Philosophy at Cam- bridge 1952–68, and at Virginia and Oregon. Wisdom was enormously appreciative and yet critical of the anti- metaphysical arguments of both G. E. Moore, with his emphasis on common sense, and the later Wittgenstein, who claimed that metaphysical theories are basically mis- conceptions caused by our failure to appreciate the variety of functions of ordinary language. Wisdom argued on the contrary that the extraordinary, paradoxical-sounding claims of poets and scientists, theologians, and metaphys- icians can be illuminating as well as misleading, and are often both. Plain thought can conceal what extravagant metaphor reveals—but also vice versa. Thus insight can often be obtained only by appreciating the dialectical argument between the apparently obvious and the flam- boyantly surreal, each of which may have something to be said for it. In Other Minds (1952) Wisdom particularly applied these insights to *scepticism and the philosophy of mind. a.j.l. John Wisdom, Philosophy and Psycho-analysis (Oxford, 1953). Wissenschaftslehre. German for the ‘theory of science or knowledge’. For Fichte, it is simply philosophy, since no opponent of the enterprise is a philosopher; it derives all knowledge and science from a self-evident axiom: ‘All other propositions will have only a mediate certainty, derived from it, while it must be immediately certain.’ Bolzano’s Wissenschaftslehre (1837) argues (and helped to convince Husserl) that logic has nothing to do with psychology; it studies non-temporal, non-spatial, ideal objects: proofs, propositions, concepts. m.j.i. B. Bolzano, Theory of Science (Dordrecht, 1973). J. G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) (New York, 1970). Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann (1889–1951). The leading analytical philosopher of the twentieth century, whose two major works altered the course of the subject. Whether by agreement or by disagreement, whether through understanding or misunderstanding, his influ- ence has moulded the evolution of philosophy from the 1920s. Born in Vienna, he studied engineering, first in Berlin, then in Manchester. Gravitating towards philosophy, he went to Cambridge in 1912 to work with Russell. He served in the Austrian army in the First World War, and while on active duty completed his first masterpiece (and only book published in his lifetime) the Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus (1921). From 1920 to 1926 he worked as a schoolteacher. The next two years were occupied with designing and building a mansion in Vienna for his sister. During this period he came into contact with the *Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers much influenced by his early ideas, which, sometimes through misunderstand- ing, were the mainspring of their Logical Positivism. In 1929 he returned to philosophical work at Cambridge, where he spent the rest of his teaching life. Between 1929 and 1932 his ideas underwent dramatic change, which he consolidated over the next fifteen years. Reacting against his own early philosophy, he developed a quite different viewpoint. Initially communicated only through pupils, these ideas revolutionized philosophy in mid-century. They were given definitive expression in his second mas- terpiece, the Philosophical Investigations (1953), published two years after his death. Over subsequent decades, a fur- ther dozen unfinished books and four volumes of lecture notes taken by pupils were published. Wittgenstein’s greatest contributions to philosophy can be classified under five headings: philosophy of Wittgenstein, Ludwig 959 . in the 1880s and the concept of Wohfahrstaat in the 1920s. The USA has been much less influenced by these ideas. At the moment there seems to be a move away from welfarism in the UK and other parts. virtue, the misery of war, the causes of war, the *just war, and the possibility of creating peace and universal brotherhood. But war has been important to philosophy in other ways too. The dis- astrous. papers Walton has addressed issues concerning the aesthetics of photography, the aesthetics of music, the embedding of moral perspectives in literature, and the role of simulation in aesthetic appreciation.